


graduating from the school of never forgive and never forget

by coldmackerel



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, based on that one relationship post, but written with absolute dedication to the notion that breakfast food is the superior food, completely ridiculous I promise you, content warning: parole and all the problems associated with it, content warning: police contact and arrest, where the girl's boyfriend was addicted to getting into fights with the Waffle House fry cook
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-08-02
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:54:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 32,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24327613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldmackerel/pseuds/coldmackerel
Summary: The seat directly in front of the grill is open and don’t mind if she does. She folds her hands on the dirty counter and stares intently at the back of the cook’s head. So she’s one day out of prison: just thin, precarious ice between her feet and spending the rest of her best years behind bars, and she’s decided she’s going to stomp.She’s going to ruin everything.She’s going to physically fight a fry cook at a ten-head diner in the worst part of the city over almost nothing whatsoever.These are the decisions that make us as people.[complete.]
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 126
Kudos: 684





	1. part 1

**Author's Note:**

> i'm writing this entirely in writing sprints and forcing myself to leave it alone in an attempt to conquer my obsessive tendencies. if you see me lurking, take me by the collar and see me out.
> 
> we celebrate my mistakes in this fic and no i won't be taking questions at this time.
> 
> it is, i absolutely promise you, a completely ridiculous fic.
> 
> enjoy if you must,

____________________

part 1

____________________

After ten years they dress her in sweatpants and a discolored white shirt because the clothes she arrived in don’t fit anymore, can’t fit, she’s _filled out_ . They reunite her with the decade-old contents of her pockets and hand her gate money in the discretionary amount of two crisp twenty dollar bills with a bus ticket to _who cares, please leave_ , and that’s all. The gates close behind her and the bus picks her up before noon.

The windows rattle the whole way, even when she tries to hold it down with her temple, and she’s left feeling bruised by the time they make their singular scheduled stop at a gas station. The bus driver eyes her warily when she pushes past him into the brisk day. She must be _dangerous_. He’s right.

It’s fall and she’s free.

There are four ten-year-old quarters in her pocket and she can’t remember why they were there when she was arrested, what she intended them for. It doesn’t matter anyhow, two of them disappear down the coin slot of a disgusting payphone.

_“Parole, Officer Vasiliev.”_

“Gas station, Parolee Astankova,” Villanelle mimics in a deep voice. It’s pretty close, he should be impressed.

Vasiliev lets out a long, groaning sigh, and she wonders just how her reputation has preceded her. _“Did your bus come in?”_

“No. They say we’re still two hours away.”

_“Then why are you calling me?”_

“I’m lonely.”

Vasiliev hangs up on her and she considers just how valuable the last two quarters in her pocket are. She has _nothing._

They call it freedom, but instead of locking you in, they lock you out.

  
  


____________________

  
  


Officer Vasiliev is waiting for her at the bus stop on the city limits, all old and cranky. “You said two hours,” he gripes, mouth flat, annoyed like the rest. His coat swallows him like he wants to disappear.

“I like to keep people waiting,” Villanelle shrugs. “It’s how you let people know you’re valuable.”

“Valuable?” Vasiliev laughs, grins, ticks his head to the side. “Is that so? What is in your pockets, _your majesty?_ ”

Villanelle ignores him. “Where are you taking me?”

“My office to go over the terms of your parole. How to stay on my good side. Then I’ll leave you at the halfway house.”

Villanelle frowns and shakes her head. “Oh, no. I don’t want that. Take me to breakfast.”

“It’s almost dinner time,” he points out, full of so many astute observations.

“ _Mr. Parole Officer,_ ” Villanelle gasps, affronted by the very notion. “Breakfast is when I’m eating breakfast food, haven’t you heard. I have been imprisoned for ten years. Do you think the clock is going to stop me from doing what I want? Do you think _you_ are?”

“They’re paying me to.”

“You’re going to be needing a raise,” Villanelle advises in good spirits, grabbing his elbow and escorting him back to the car park. “I haven’t had real eggs in ten years, you know? It is the one thing I missed most. Take me to real eggs and you can say whatever boring things you want at me. I might even listen.”

  
  


____________________

  
  


He makes the mistake of handing over his badge when she pesters him for it. “Konstantin,” she over pronounces, shooting him a wide grin that sours his expression. “Where are you from in Russia?”

“Let’s not get familiar.”

When he reaches for his badge, she yanks it out of his reach, holding it up high and far from his grabbing hands. “We might even be family.”

“Oh, no. My family is much better than you,” he smiles thinly and does his best to devote his attention back to the road. “They are good people.”

Villanelle keeps his badge hostage and turns to press her palms against the clean windows, studying the way the parkway trees have begun to turn out of synch with no lack of wonder. The ones that have caught fire, burst into red and flushed with the coming season change hold her attention longest. She hurts her neck, pulls something when she tries to keep them in view as Konstantin speeds past.

“I haven’t seen a tree in ten years,” she says against the fogging glass.

Konstantin is quiet for long moments before he says, “Probably shouldn’t have murdered someone.”

Villanelle laughs abruptly and she can feel him staring at the back of her head. “Well. Probably shouldn’t have gotten _caught_ ,” she corrects.

  
  


____________________

  
  


Konstantin parks in front of a split storefront between Sally’s Cuts and a restaurant with no apparent name other than “BREAKFAST”. That’s all it says, it’s an established, installed sign, they’ve _chosen this._

“Is this where I get murdered?” Villanelle wonders, pushing away from her window to give Konstantin a dubious look. “What kind of restaurant is this?”

“Breakfast,” Konstantin _sasses_ , the arsehole.

Villanelle purses her lips and considers throwing a fit about it. She’s thrown bigger fits for less, but she _really_ wants eggs and the location is appropriately, maybe even tantalizingly labeled. Konstantin makes her decision for her - he’s already getting out of the car and heading for the entrance. She watches him go through the windshield, hands on her knees, cuff-length apart. When she doesn’t follow, he turns back and gives her a strange look. It takes an impatient gesture and a held open door for her to remember this is a thing she can do now.

It is far from trust, earned or otherwise, but it’s agency.

She has _agency._

Villanelle climbs out of the car quickly and accepts the open door gesture with genuine, giddy delight. Even the grease-slick, thick air of the stuffy diner smells like the closest thing she’s ever had to freedom.

Oh, she can’t wait to make them _pay_ for it.

“Counter or table?” Konstantin asks and it’s a very literal question. There is one counter. And there is one two-top table by the window. Two men hunch almost paternally over their shallow, chipped mugs of coffee on the far end of the counter saying nothing to each other. The cook standing over a flat top grill behind the counter flips a pancake and it somehow becomes the loudest thing in the diner.

Villanelle considers her options, because for once in her life, she is allowed. And she has them.

Her attention drifts quickly to a machine on the far wall, it’s plastic dome covered in years of unattended dust and airborne grime, but it’s magnetism undeniable. Konstantin makes an impatient noise where she leaves him to examine it, fingers pressed to the display as she drinks it in greedily. It asks her for fifty cents and it is destiny ten years in the making that she has only that in her pockets at this exact moment in time.

Konstantin joins her, grumbling under his breath.

“What is this?”

“A jukebox. It plays songs.”

Villanelle lights up. “What is the best American song ever written?”

“Why?”

Villanelle gives him an affronted look. “This is a special day! I’m certainly not going to play the _worst_ American song ever written.”

“I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure when I took my citizenship test, the correct answer was ‘ _Star Spangled Banner_ ’. Does that help?”

Villanelle clicks through the records and is sad to report, “it’s not on here.” Konstantin gives her a look like he thinks they’re both about to let this go or something, he has _so_ much to learn about her. “Hey!” She shouts across the diner and one of the men turns to blink through red-rimmed eyes at her. “What is the greatest American song ever written?”

His head swings back down to his coffee cup heavily and his mouth purses thoughtfully. After a long minute, he shrugs. “J _ust What I Needed_.”

“No, just what _I_ need,” Villanelle corrects. “Hurry up.”

“The Cars,” he scoffs, throwing a few bills on the counter and leaving like she was finished with him. “Millennials,” he mutters on his way out.

Villanelle turns back to the jukebox, clicking rapidly to watch the plastic covers flip by. As she’s mashing the button just to watch them blur together, she spots The Cars. And the song, ah, she is understanding now. Thank you kind stranger.

Her destiny quarters disappear into the coin slot and the machine groans to life. It’s all very satisfying, very worth her last worldly possessions. She’s not familiar with it, but she’s a _real_ American now, she has the fresh, ten year order to lie flat under a judge’s thumb to prove it. 

“How did he know that this was just what I needed?” She marvels, pulling a face that Konstantin is too serious and professional to return. He is so boring already.

They seat themselves at the counter and Konstantin stares at her from the corner of his eye while he thinks she’s looking at the single-page laminate menu, bobbing her head to the song. The novelty he finds in staring at a real, live felon in the flesh is remarkable for a parole officer.

Villanelle sets her menu down. “I want everything,” she declares.

Konstantin laughs at her, on her special day no less. “They give good gate money these days?”

“No. But you’re paying.”

“I am not,” he says. It’s so cute, he really believes it.

Villanelle raises her eyebrow and leans in all conspiratorial. “Well it’s going to be really awkward when I don’t either. _Officer_.”

He’s ready to rebuke her, but the frycook turns around and drops two stained mugs on saucers in front of them in a messy clatter and leans a hand down on the counter between them. “What do you want?” She asks.

“Everything,” Villanelle offers honestly.

Konstantin takes the menu from her hands to stack under his own and passes them across the counter. “Three eggs, bacon extra crispy, and a short stack of pancakes. She’ll have the same.”

“Right,” the woman says slowly. “How do you want your eggs?”

“Over-easy,” they say at the same time and Konstantin turns to give Villanelle a disingenuous smile.

“For your special day,” he adds.

The frycook looks between them, unimpressed. “Whatever,” she mutters by way of customer service, then turns back to her grill.

“You remembered,” Villanelle says, placing one delicate hand over her heart. “You do care.”

“Oh, I’m going to remember _everything_ about you,” Konstantin assures her. “You’re going to _hate_ me. You won’t even have dreams I don’t know about. You think parole is freedom?”

“I think breakfast is freedom,” Villanelle shrugs. “You’re ruining it. Can’t I just have this one special day before I remember how terrible everything is?”

“You can have one day,” Konstantin agrees. “But the special conditions of your parole aren’t flexible. And bright and early tomorrow morning, I’m going to deliver you personally to your morning community service. And you’ll do that every morning for _years.”_

Villanelle’s eyes widen. “Hey, I won’t tell if you won’t.”

“My job is to tell. After that, we find _you_ a job, because you must be employed to stay in the halfway house. And you must live in the halfway house to have a permanent address. And you need a permanent address to stay out of prison. That is your only goal. You understand?”

“I understand?” Villanelle tries, face screwed up in thought. “Theoretically.”

“Try to understand literally.” He sips at his coffee and makes a face, before putting it back on the saucer and pushing it away from him. “We’re not keen on second chances here. It’s a bad system, Oksana. It’s going to exhaust you for no reason whatsoever. Sometimes you’ll think it’s worse than prison. You’re alone here, you understand? I’m being honest.”

“You’re being depressing. And they don’t call me that anymore. Call me Villanelle.”

“I will call you what I want to call you. I’ve tried being a cheerleader for my parolees. It only makes things worse. You want my advice?” And she doesn’t, but he has the look of a man who couldn’t care less. “Suffer the indignities. Keep your head down. Wait it out. Survive.”

“What do you think I have been doing for ten years?” She shakes her head at him, snickers at the perturbed look on his face. “Relax. I am good at suffering. It’s my specialty.”

“Your disciplinary file says otherwise.”

“That’s the thing about suffering,” Villanelle rolls her eyes at him. “It only really hurts if you know how to have fun in between.” She sticks her tongue out, twirls her finger in a sarcastic circle, but he’s so uptight, he doesn’t even smile. “You do know what fun is right?”

In record time, four drab plates slide across the counter with their food and the frycook has turned back to her grill without comment. Villanelle’s eyes go wide and she pushes up her sleeves, studying her meal with absolute devotion. This may, and she intends no exaggeration, be the best moment of her life.

Konstantin tries to ruin everything by saying, “I know they feed you in prison too.”

He knows nothing.

Villanelle crunches an entire piece of bacon down to her fingers, filling her mouth as she saws into a pancake with the blunt edge of her fork and shoves that in too. Her eyes close and she groans loud enough to fill the restaurant. Konstantin is probably staring again, but he’s so meaningless in the moment.

She hacks right through the middle of one of the eggs and pauses with her fork hovering above the plate. Instead of spilling out, the soft inside of the egg barely runs at all.

It’s ruined!

Everything is ruined!

“What the fuck is this?” Villanelle demands, whipping around in her seat and yes, Konstantin had been staring at her.

“What?” He asks and she already asked that, what is the point of him.

“I asked _what_! What is this?” She picks up one of her plates and holds the egg under his nose. He opens his mouth, but she bowls him over. “This isn’t over-easy. This is over-my-dead-body.” Konstantin tries to speak again, but she’s done with him. “Hey! Frycook lady!”

“Oksana,” Konstantin tries to appease her, but she swats him away.

The cook turns slowly, mouth tight against her irritation, which is just rich because Villanelle is the one entitled to the irritation. “These were supposed to be over-easy,” Villanelle narrows her eyes and pushes her plate forward. “They’re over cooked.”

The frycook looks down at her plate, then back up into her eyes. If she’s expecting Villanelle to back down, she should probably know that Villanelle had very little to do for ten years besides stare people down and resort to violence over very, _very_ trivial things. She’d hardly blink.

Wordlessly, the cook picks up her plate and turns back to the grill. She gives Konstantin a self-satisfied smile, but he seems less sure. “I don’t think this is going to go the way you think it will.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” she grimaces, just for show. “That murder, aye. If I had known, right?”

“Don’t say the M-word in public, please,” he sighs. “We’re trying to rehabilitate you here.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“I get paid to pretend I believe that.” He chews on his own bacon, shaking his head to himself.

The cook turns back around and drops Villanelle’s plate in front of her. There’s one blissful beat of anticipation, excitements, then-

“Oi!” Villanelle slaps her hands down on the countertop. She will not sit here and be insulted like this. These are not the specific indignities she expected to suffer.

Her eggs are perfectly, tragically scrambled.

The cook doesn’t turn around again.

  
  


____________________

  
  


After Konstantin drops her off at the halfway house, she’s handed a standard-issue stale bologna sandwich in welcome and two keys into the building. They leave her on the steps of 2E and tell her to introduce herself to her roommate, but Stacy Wayne is passed out on her bed, drooling off some high and catching flies between her rotting teeth. Villanelle takes the opportunity to rifle through the woman’s belongings, but even that proves boring. All she has to show for her evening is a $5 bill from Stacy’s sock drawer and a package of cinnamon gum.

The bed is just wider than the one in solitary, a full, luxurious single with sheets she hopes had been washed at some point, ever. Prison still clings to her skin, she can feel it like stains on her hands, but there’s some small, shameful part of her scared to wash it down the drain. If prison was nothing, then nothing was all she had.

Without it, she has less than nothing.

She pulls the sheets up to her nose and starfishes as wide as she can in the new expanse of her bed. In the dark, it doesn’t feel any different.

____________________

  
  


They dress her in secondhand clothes in the morning, buttoning her up in a too-big flannel that she has to stuff into borrowed, cuffed jeans. Suffer the indignities, Konstantin said.

She suffers them.

It’s either that or meet Konstantin out on the curb in front of the halfway house in nothing whatsoever. And if that is to be her future, she’s certainly not going to do it for free.

She has to sit on the curb for nearly a half an hour, chin in her hands and shoe heel bouncing impatiently, before Konstantin rolls up in his ugly Crown Victoria. He honks at her and leans out his window on one arm. “Nice clothes,” he grins. “Dumpster diving?”

“Yeah. Was that your wife I met while I was in there? She’s very ugly.”

Konstantin nods, still tickled. “Yes, but her _cooking_ ,” he chortles, peeling away from the curb the second she’s climbed in. “I got you a gift, don’t look so sad.”

“I’m not sad, I’m dressed like a farmer. I’ll make it work, but these are trying times for me, please be respectful.”

“Oh, I won’t,” he assures her, twisting around to reach into the back seat.

While he swerves a bit, still digging even as they approach a busier, more frantic city road, Villanelle vaguely hopes they get sideswiped and die instantly. This feeling doesn’t go away when Konstantin emerges, crowing victoriously with a shiny orange safety vest, freshly emblazoned with “ASTANKOVA”. So that no matter what indignities she must suffer, it is certain that everyone will know about it.

He drops her off in a defunct municipal auto impound with the other felons, some in better shape than others. They’re queuing up at a clipboard to sign in just past the promise land gateway of a portable metal detector. Villanelle turns slowly to give Konstantin her best pleading look.

He’s near to bursting with glee when he leans across her lap and pushes her door open for her. “Play nice with the other kids, okay slugger?”

“Don’t make me do this.”

“Make new friends and good choices. I’ll pick you up at 1400 hours.”

____________________

  
  


She does not make new friends or good choices. Someone tries to take her granola bar that they’re issued halfway through the day and she nearly breaks his fingers. Luckily, they’re both on the same page and when their babysitter hollers and comes to ask what happened, they both toe the party line.

“Nothing,” they say in perfect unison.

She doesn’t even want the granola bar, really, it’s just principle. Have and have not are the only tenants Moses came down the mountain with. Or at least those are the only ones passed to them through prison bars.

They spend the day tidying up the median parkways near the medical district. The seasoned, trusted veterans get to trim shrubs and trees, but Villanelle is untested and otherwise untrusted with garden shears or anything sharp. She’s given a bag and a pair of gloves that smell like roadkill and the thrilling task of collecting litter.

It’s a long day.

  
  


____________________

  
  
  


Konstantin doesn’t actually pick her up at 1400 hours and she’s not sure why, but she is sure that being disappointed by the absence of her parole officer is a symptom of reaching what is commonly referred to as rock bottom. It coincides delightfully with the knowledge that she has no idea how to get home, but is certain it’s at least five miles.

Fall has bloomed perfectly around her, weather bowing gently, gradually, on-time, and harmonious to the axial tilt like they’d been practicing this year. Rare and dare we say serendipitous. Everything at peak color so even the ugly parts of the city glow.

Villanelle wishes she could see in color. Wishes she could afford it, but everything just looks…

grey.

She’s given vague directions by a disinterested officer and clambers back over unpaved express lanes, hopping guard rails and flipping off honking cars as she picks her way back toward her end of town. Everything’s about as bad as it can be until she spots nine glowing letters on the world’s ugliest storefront like scripture.

BREAKFAST.

It makes her feel something and that’s nothing to be ignored.

  
  


____________________

  
  


The door bounces loudly against the back wall when she throws it open and everyone inside turns around. Everyone except the frycook.

The frycook stares diligently down at the flattop as she flips a line of pancakes.

Villanelle stands in the entryway, having their showdown all by herself. If she must, she will.

The seat directly in front of the grill is open and don’t mind if she does. She folds her hands on the dirty counter and stares intently at the back of the cook’s head. So she’s one day out of prison, just thin, precarious ice between her feet and spending the rest of her best years behind bars, and she’s decided she’s going to _stomp._

She’s going to ruin everything.

She’s going to physically fight a fry cook at a ten-head diner in the worst part of the city over almost nothing whatsoever.

These are the decisions that make us as people.

“Hey,” Villanelle calls across the counter. “Fry Cook lady.”

The cook calmly finishes stacking pancakes on several plates and clears the flat top with a long, practiced swipe of her spatula before thwacking it down in the grease trap. Without looking at Villanelle, she takes the plates down the counter to two men with hardhats dangling between their knees from the hooks under the counter. When, and only when, she’s finished, she comes back and stands square in front of Villanelle, leaning forward on her forearms to look her in the eye.

“Parolee lady,” she greets.

Villanelle’s mouth opens and it doesn’t figure out what to do from there. No part of her does. She came in there intending to kill someone over some overcooked eggs and a shit day, but instead finds herself blurting out, “What’s your name?”

The frycook considers her, so unimpressed it makes her want to _impress_ her. “Why?”

Villanelle blinks at her and blurts out, “You’re beautiful.”

The cook laughs in her face.

Villanelle frowns, but the cook is already turning away. “Over-easy, right?”

“Yes, if you can manage this time.” Villanelle feels...thwarted. People were not meant to be kept in boxes. “They were shit last time.”

The cook gestures over her shoulder with her spatula as she cracks two eggs in one hand at the same time, the showoff. “So were you.”

“You remember me?” Villanelle asks, propping her cheeks in both fists as she watches the woman work. She has nothing at all in this world, but she’d be happy with just her name, she thinks. She _needs_ it. 

The cook drops a few slices of thick sliced bread in a vat of beaten eggs and throws them on the back of the grill with a handful of cinnamon and a few slices of bacon. “Not a lot of new faces around here.”

“And none so memorable as mine,” Villanelle decides proudly.

The cook laughs again and Villanelle must watch in horror while she snatches up a second spatula and mercilessly hacks into the eggs sitting _innocently_ on the flat top, oh, they were so young. She thinks she yells something, but the trauma blocks it out.

A minute later, the cook turns around and drops two scrambled eggs and a plate of french toast and bacon in front of her with a wicked smile on her face. “For my favorite new customer,” she simpers. “Coffee?”

“You’ve ruined them,” Villanelle declares, aghast as she pushes away from the counter with both hands. “Why are you like this?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Judas!” Villanelle declares, pushing the eggs away and spearing an entire triangle slice of french toast on her fork that promptly gets stuffed in her mouth. “Beautiful Judas. How do you know I’m on parole?” She redirects.

The cook taps over her own heart until Villanelle looks down and realizes she’s still wearing her orange safety vest, complete with her own, damning name. “I’m in construction,” she lies.

The cook shakes her head and grins. “No you’re not, Farmer Brown. That’ll be six bucks.”

“You didn’t even make my eggs right!”

“That’ll be ten bucks.”

Villanelle shunts the plate of eggs over the counter so the dish shatters behind the counter at the cook’s feet. “How much for that?”

The cook reaches out and pushes the plate of french toast and bacon into Villanelle’s lap with a sweet smile. “Free of charge.”

  
  


____________________

  
  


Konstantin finds her wandering around 5th Avenue sometime after dark with no clue where she’s supposed to be and ten dollars less than she started her day with. One spoiled breakfast later and all she’s got to show for it is syrup stains on her borrowed, baggy pants.

“What are you doing?” He asks, matching her crawling pace in his ugly car.

Villanelle won’t look at him. “Going back to the house.”

“You’re going the wrong way.”

Villanelle furrows her brows. “It’s more scenic.”

They pass a building with many, many penises drawn over it’s shuttered, abandoned windows and okay, okay, we are all very good at the irony. “Get in,” Konstantin demands.

And normally this would be a good time to stand on principle, but she has been wandering around for many hours. Defeated, she climbs into his car and turns away from him to stare at the window. She doesn’t want to talk about it.

“I’m sorry I didn’t pick you up. I told you to make friends.”

“I did.”

“I should have told you to make friends with vehicular transport.” When she says nothing, he lets out a long sigh. “I am sorry, okay? My daughter had some homework emergency. Then I couldn’t find you.”

Villanelle folds her arms across the ledge under the passenger window, pressing her forehead against it. “Whatever. I don’t care, okay?”

“I care,” he insists, _lies_ so easily, like he was born doing it.

Villanelle blows out a sad huff of laughter that fogs up the glass. “I know. But not about me.”

  
  
  


____________________

  
  
  


She goes to bed bitter, in a borrowed shirt, with an empty stomach.

Stacy asks her if she has any extra money, she’s _itching_ , but Villanelle makes it very clear that she’d be better off asking the Chief of Police for drug money for all the good it will do her.

Stacy storms out and doesn’t come back and finally, Villanelle is left alone to hate her life in peace. She thinks only of the frycook.

  
  


____________________

  
  


“I said I was sorry,” Konstantin tries again when he’s driving her to another day in abject torment. He’s wasting his breath - a cop’s _sorry_ is worth as much as a pig’s. Perhaps less. “Don’t be mad.”

“I’m not mad,” Villanelle mumbles. “I don’t care.”

“That’s worse! I will pick you up today, I promise, okay? I’ll take you for lunch and we can talk about getting you a job. And maybe more reliable transportation.”

“I don’t want lunch,” Villanelle pouts. “I want breakfast.”

  
  


____________________

  
  


His name is Gabriel, the man so determined to steal her granola bar. They bond somehow when Villanelle gets angry at one of the other garbage pickers - fucking Jeff, the fucker - and mimes cutting his head off with garden sheers while he’s bent over picking up cigarrette butts. Gabriel laughs, because if _murder_ isn’t funny anymore, then what is?

Gabriel gives her his granola bar during break and asks if she knows how he can go about getting into the business of running cocaine. She politely informs him that she’s without such connections, but recommends BREAKFAST if he finds himself feeling hungry. It is as much of a friend as she’s had in a while.

“Do you ever feel like this is worse than prison?” She asks offhand while they sit about in the parkway grass, waiting for Officer McNulty to start yelling again.

Gabriel takes a long drink from his water bottle, then spits at his feet. “In prison, I was a king.”

“Me too,” Villanelle agrees.

They’re on the same page.

“What’s that?” She asks, pointing at a collection of crosses tattooed on his forearm.

Gabriel looks down and flexes them against the coil of muscle in his enormous forearms. “Kills,” he says darkly.

Villanelle holds his eye for a long minute, then cracks into a teasing grin. “You are such a liar.”

Gabriel grins too and holds a finger to his lips.

  
  


____________________

  
  


Konstantin does pick her up at 1400 hours, but she was raised by the school of never forgive and never forget. You don’t graduate, you just get meaner.

“I brought classifieds,” he tempts, holding out a stack of newspapers.

Villanelle doesn’t take them from him, just turns her nose up and re-rolls her sleeves for the millionth time that day. She needs real clothes so very badly. “Okay, Grandpa.”

“All of the worst jobs are in the classifieds. And that’s what you’re going to get, you understand? You are qualified only for _worst_ jobs,” he explains patiently, the arsehole. “This is what it means to be free.”

“Wow, this is garbage,” Villanelle chuckles. She snatches the stack of newspapers and puts them in her lap. In prison she rarely held down any one job for more than a week or two. She was in and out of various lockdowns and holding cells and disciplinary hearings and isn’t that just exemplary of the american judicial system, that here she is on early release anyhow?

The closest thing to a job Villanelle has ever had is fleecing the new inmates out of their personal belongings and commissary funds.

“I promised lunch. What do you want?” He sighs.

Her company is such a chore to him, like everyone else. “I don’t want lunch,” Villanelle repeats. “Take me to breakfast.”

“What’s with you and breakfast?” Villanelle remains stubbornly quiet and he relents. “Whatever. Anne’s is on the way.”

“No, no. I want BREAKFAST. I want the ugly restaurant from before.”

Konstantin laughs like he thinks she’s kidding, but it dies in his throat when he sees how deadly serious she is. “What? Why? Anne’s is much better.”

“No. I prefer BREAKFAST.”

“You haven’t even had the food at Anne’s and you hated the eggs at Breakfast.”

“You asked me where I want to go and where I want to go is BREAKFAST.”

Konstantin throws a hand up in the air. “How are you even speaking in capital letters? I can take you to five restaurants within two miles that have better food.”

Villanelle narrows her eyes and stares out the windshield. “It’s not about the food.”

  
  


____________________

  
  


Konstantin holds the door open for her again and seems surprised when Villanelle takes the best seat in the house, right behind where the cook is dual-wielding spatulas to flip an army of pancakes and bacon for a little congregation of landscapers at the single table in the window, spilling out over to the far end of the bartop counter. He gives her a weird look, but she won’t return it. She’s staring at the cook.

All she gets when the cook turns around and spots her is an, “Oh great.”

The inflection does not match the sentiment.

Villanelle watches like a hawk as she moves down the counter, plates lined along her arms and balanced on seemingly nothing until she’s able to slide them across to the waiting customers. Konstantin is still staring at her.

What? Like he’s never seen a lesbian before, honestly.

The cook comes back. “Over-easy,” she greets.

“Not typically. But for you? As easy as you’d like.”

Konstantin chokes on his coffee and it dribbles down his chin into the collar of his shirt. “Oksana,” he cautions, but it is much too late for all of that.

“You’re very confident for someone wearing their grandfather’s flannel. What do you want to eat?”

Villanelle raises her eyebrows. “Is that really a question you want to be asking me?”

“I’m sorry about her,” Konstantin butts in, curling an arm over the counter and angling his body toward Villanelle’s to give her a very stern look, very scary. “She’s forgotten she’s living in an actual society again.”

The cook laughs dryly. “Is she, though?”

“When are you going to tell me your name?” Villanelle demands, leaning forward as far as she can across the counter. “I want it.”

“First rule of parole? Get used to never getting what you want,” the cook advises with a sympathetic pout. “Usual, Konstantin?”

“Yes, please,” he says with a strained smile. But the second the cook turns back to her grill, it falls into a glare that he directs back at Oksana. “Stop getting into trouble.”

Oksana ignores him. “She knows you? You know _her?”_

“I know lots of people. I’m very likeable,” he says like he’s daring her to fight him on it. “You could stand some lessons on that. Now,” he slips the newspapers in front of her again and taps his finger against the first page of classifieds. “Homework, Astankova. We need to get you a job.” She’s still staring at the cook’s back when Konstantin starts snapping his fingers in front of her nose. “Down, girl.”

“That’s the goal,” Villanelle says absently.

“Look, would you? What do you want to do? You want to clean dishes? Do deliveries, what? There are options here,” Konstantin exasperates. “You want to know how people fail out of this the quickest? They run out of money.”

Villanelle sighs and looks down at the newspaper glumly. “The only thing I’m good at is being bad.”

“You’re going to have to try harder,” he lectures. And she is, she’s trying _very_ hard, but life has given her a bike in lowest gear. She can pedal until her feet fall off and she’ll barely clear the block. It’s not about hard work, it’s what life hands you and you can either take it or you can get creative.

Villanelle leans around Konstantin to the group of landscapers picking over their pancakes. “Hey,” she calls out. A few of them turn toward her, blinking tiredly at her. “What do you do? I need a job.”

“Mow lawns. Pull weeds,” one of them shrugs.

Another elbows him. “We’re not hiring.”

Villanelle narrows her eyes, taps her chin and considers them. “Okay, I accept. I can work afternoons starting tomorrow. Also, I’m on parole. But don’t worry, it was only murder.”

A long moment passes in complete silence and Villanelle realizes even the grill has gone quiet. Konstantin lowers his face into his hands, but his prayers are wasted, she cannot be helped and if she could, god would probably choose not to.

One of the landscapers snorts and wipes his mouth with a paper napkin and it’s only then that Villanelle recognizes him. “Gabriel,” she calls. “Give me a job! You know you want to.”

His coworkers turn to stare at him and Gabriel shrugs like he has no control over the situation, laughing to himself. “You won’t like it,” he warns. “Come by the yard at 8th and Jackson tomorrow and I’ll prove it to you.”

“I don’t like anything,” she reminds him, then turns back to grin at Konstantin. “You make so much of nothing. See?” She folds up the newspaper and reaches out to tuck them into the inner breast pocket of Konstantin’s wool coat. When they’re stowed away, she pats at his chest. “Jobs are everywhere. Even for one so useless as I.”

“I think maybe you’re insane,” he says thoughtfully.

Villanelle smiles at him, lifting her hands so the cook can slide their food in front of them. “Oh, I am so much _worse_ than that.” When she looks down and finds two perfectly hard-boiled eggs on her plate, she slams both fists onto the counter, making Konstantin jump.

“You _arsehole_!”

The frycook’s shoulders shake with unmistakable mirth.

  
  


____________________

  
  


She rides with Gabriel to her new job after they’ve finished painting over graffiti on a municipal office, because it was very sweet of him to tell her to meet him god knows where, miles from the city, but very literally impossible. 

He drives an old, unfortunate looking Mercury and she wonders if anyone in the city drives anything that’s not ugly. Their neighborhood is like a gutter - everything that can’t find a way to cling to something better gets washed down like so much streetwater until they’re all left congealing at the lowest point. It’s like they live in an accident.

“You’re going to hate it,” Gabriel repeats, grinning to himself, bobbing his head along to a heavy beat lacquered over with Spanish.

Villanelle returns his smile sardonically. “You think things can get worse for me?”

“For people like us? Things can _always_ get worse.”

  
  


____________________

  
  


She gets packed in the back of a pickup with two wide-shouldered men, practically smothered in her light jacket and work shorts. One offers her a beer probably just to see if she’ll take it and she figures, when in Rome?

Her dedication to the lifestyle tickles them and she gets several back slaps like clubs against her spine.

Their first job is outside a small Catholic school in the nicer parts of the city and it gives her brief pause as she’s handed a little hand trowel and pointed in the direction of plastic buckets full of new, shiny grasses and hardier ferns to last the cold weather. “They hire felons to do their yard work?” She wonders aloud.

Gabriel smiles, all teeth. “No. Only the upstandingest of citizens,” he pledges with his hand over his heart.

Villanelle nods. “Ah. You lie.”

“Listen, Astankova,” he schools her, one hand politely on her back while he gestures to the well-dressed children flocking from the doors to their parents’ nice cars, attentive mothers and fathers. “You don’t survive the system. The system must survive us.”

“That’s poetic, Gabriel.”

He shrugs and puts a pinkish prairie grass in her hands. “You get it, right? You can’t win the game if you don’t break the rules. Be smart and never, _ever_ tell the truth.”

  
  


______________________

  
  


They make her plant things, because flowers and ferns are for girls or whatever. She wants to use the woodchipper, but Gabriel seems supremely, fairly suspicious of this. He warns the rest against it and he’s just no fun at all.

But by the end of the day, the school’s been cleared of rotting tulip stems and displaced bulbs. They’ve recycled the floral fashion of yesterday and replaced it with another temporary fix, mulched it over and called it done. It looks nice.

Landscaping sucks, though. Villanelle feels dirty and weary to her bones as she sits on a cooler and ignores the other men while they rib her about her thin arms and her vacant expression. If they think this will prevent her from coming back tomorrow, they have a lot to learn about her.

“I think they like you,” Gabriel mentions casually as they drive away in his groaning car.

Villanelle shoots him a dry look. “I want to use the wood chipper tomorrow.”

“Keep dreaming.”

“My dreams are much worse,” she promises.

Gabriel laughs darkly to himself and maybe he understands or maybe he’s stupid and doesn’t believe her, it’s hard to say. “Come on, I’ll get you dinner. What do you want?”

“I want breakfast,” Villanelle says automatically.

Gabriel raises an eyebrow at her. “Didn’t you just have that for lunch yesterday?”

“Don’t offer something if you don’t mean it.”

  
  


____________________

  
  


There’s nobody in the diner when they walk in and Villanelle _almost_ finds herself wishing Gabriel would piss off too, but then he does a very good thing. He offers a nod to the frycook and says, “Whaddup, Eve?”

A slow, sinister smile spreads across Villanelle’s face.

_Gotcha._

Eve. Eve, Eve, Eve.

_Eve._

“Hey,” she says. Eve says. Because that is her name and she is saying it.

“Eve,” Villanelle points out - she’s unable to think of much else.

Surprisingly, Eve cracks a smile when she sees Villanelle standing there in her dirty boots, a size too big and blistering badly, she can already feel it. “Overeasy,” she greets. Is that her? Do they have a _thing_ now? Oh, she’d give anything.

When they sit at the counter, Eve gives them more attention than she ever has. There’s nothing waiting for her attention on the grill and nobody to pull her away. Villanelle knows she’s staring, but what’s a girl to do?

“Rough day?” Eve asks, stifling another smile behind her hand.

Villanelle frowns and watches the way Eve’s eyes track over her face with amusement. It dawns on her then and she snatches up a spoon from inside the folded paper napkin in front of her and holds it up to study her reflection in the back of it as best she can. There’s dirt streaked messily across both cheeks, even her forehead all the way up into her hair. Damnit.

She scrubs at her face quickly, but wonders how much good it’s even done for her. Eve leans over the counter again in that way she does where her forearms press flat into the counter and they’re eye to eye. Villanelle stares back. “Your name is Eve,” she says again.

“Hm,” Eve nods thoughtfully. “That explains why everyone keeps calling me that.” Villanelle thinks she probably shouldn’t lean across the counter and try to kiss her, but only _just._ “The usual?” Eve asks the two of them.

“My usual being disappointment,” Villanelle clarifies.

Eve shrugs. “Mine too. Similar tastes.” When she turns back to the grill, Gabriel is grinning widely at her and she rolls her eyes.

He mouths at her, _“You’re blowing it.”_

Villanelle smiles thinly. _“Blow me,”_ she mouths back.

The grill sizzles while Eve sets it up and then she has a moment to turn back around, prop her hip on the counter and give them her attention for a moment. “How was your first day?” She asks.

“Like a dream,” Villanelle returns, twirling her fork deftly between her fingers. She’s keeping a very close eye on the two eggs on the flat top. “One I hope I never wake up from. I’m actually hoping to pass peacefully in my sleep.”

Eve snorts grossly into the plastic water cup she’d brought to her lips and it feels like victory. She drags the back of her sleeve across her nose and mouth while Villanelle leans forward to watch, cheeks propped on both hands. “Weirdo,” Eve mutters, but she’s still smiling, so who has won, really?

Eve keeps staring at her and maybe that is just the effect she has on women.

“I’m sorry, I can’t look at you without laughing,” Eve finally says, leaning in against the counter and reaching out with her sleeve. Villanelle flinches back and Eve stops, one hand halfway across the counter and the other held up near her side like she’s about to capture a wild animal. 

She is!

She has no idea, poor Eve.

Villanelle stays very still and Eve closes the gap between them and rubs her sleeve across Villanelle’s cheek a few times until she’s satisfied. “Did you leave any dirt for the flowers?” Eve wonders.

“Why would I do that?”

Eve shakes her head and turns back to the grill and then Villanelle is forced to confront the way Gabriel is repeatedly, frantically waggling his eyebrows at her.

“I will murder you,” Villanelle says under her breath.

“I think she likes you,” he whispers so, so loud, the oaf.

Eve gestures over her shoulder with her spatula. “I don’t,” she assures them both.

Liar, liar, shorts aflame.

A wad of cash slides across the counter under her nose and Villanelle looks down to watch Gabriel withdraw his hand. “That’s your cut,” he explains, tapping a finger against it. “We can take you on part-time. I’ll let you know after community service when we could use an extra hand, yeah?”

“Oh,” Villanelle breathes, reaching out and spreading the money across her place setting. “It is so good to see you,” she addresses the cash. “I thought I’d never see you again.”

She’s so used to _not_ having money, that her brain goes blank on what she’s going to buy first. Money even _smells_ better than she remembers it.

“Do you need a moment alone?” Eve asks, standing there with both plates hovering above their place settings.

Quickly, Villanelle shuffles the bills into a stack and stores them inside her jacket, spreading her hands wide to bracket her place setting while she eagerly awaits her plate. Eve sets down Gabriel’s plate first without much care, but then meticulously centers Villanelle’s plate under her nose, adjusting it _just so_ until she’s satisfied.

Villanelle stares down at the perfectly poached eggs wobbling at the edge of her plate and...it’s a gentler stake to the heart. It’s not right, but it’s closer than they usually get. Eve’s still standing in front of her plate, so Villanelle looks up and gets blindsided with a genuine smile.

“Congrats on the job, Astankova,” she says and that is a much less gentle stake to the heart. “Say hi to the family, Gabriel.” Then Eve turns back behind the counter and sidles her way back to the swinging office door at the end, disappearing behind it.

“Is she single?” Villanelle asks blankly.

Gabriel laughs with his mouth full, chewing loudly and knocking his elbow against hers. “She’ll eat you alive.”

“I should be so lucky.”

  
  


____________________

  
  



	2. part 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just because im spiraling into existential, mortal dread and depression doesn't mean i can't [redacted].
> 
> there will be a part three to this, unfortunately. I am many things, but "brief", I am not.
> 
> (***added content warning for police contact and arrest in this part. it's not particularly violent or exhaustive in its description, but it's there if you need to not see/read that right now or ever. ask me if you need censoring instructions to skip these parts and I'll do my best to provide. I apologize for not tagging more exhaustively from the start. parole is just an inherently dark and often helpless backdrop, so protect yourself if that's not something you want to see. anyways, donate to your community bail bond funds if you have anything to spare.)

____________________

_part 2_

____________________

  
  
  


Konstantin is waiting for her when Gabriel drops her at the halfway house after their meal. His hands are lost in his pockets and he watches her from under the deep ridge of his stern brows, always stern. He radiates disapproval, but then, when don’t they?

“Don’t be jealous, he’s just a friend,” Villanelle tells him when she passes him on the sidewalk toward the entrance. “I promise nobody else holds my life in their government-funded fingers, you can unclench.”

Konstantin swivels into her path, tilting his chin down, all disapproving. “You be careful, okay? I know everything about everyone in community service. He’s not someone to hang around. You need to work with him? Fine. Make it nothing more.”

“Roger that, Sir,” Villanelle needles, giving him an obnoxious wink.

  
He stands his ground. “I mean it, Oksana. People have gone back for a lot less than making bad friends.”

“Don’t call me that. Did you give him this talk?” Villanelle wonders aloud. She taps at her chin and narrows her eyes playfully at him. When Konstantin doesn’t budge, it crawls under her skin and sours the smile on her face. If they’re done playing, then so be it. She can be serious too. She can be dark too - he forgets what raised her and it wasn’t curfews and kisses goodnight.

“If not, you should,” she advises, elbowing past him toward the door. “You think I am the good friend between him and I?” Crickets go quiet and cower in the grass as she stalks by, waiting for the storm of her footfalls to pass. She looks one last time over her shoulder at Konstantin and is happy for the darkness between them. “I know what I look like, Konstantin. It is easy to forget what I am and what I’ve done.”

“I have not forgotten,” he denies, but she sees the way he won’t look her in the eye and in her world that might as well be rolling over. He looks at her and can’t even imagine the things she’s done, can do, might do. She wears the disguise so well.

“Yes, I know, you don’t forget anything,” she gestures grandly. “But you are so busy. Would you like a better use of your most valuable time than trying to keep someone like me safe?” She bares her teeth at him in a wide, wide grin. “Keep people safe from me, _officer_.”

He probably has a key, but she shuts the door in his face and it brings her some measure of satisfaction, at least.

  
  
  


____________________

  
  
  


Stacy The Roommate tries to corner her in the bathroom, swings a messy, stoned fist in the general direction of her face and promptly has her head bounced off the lip of the sink. It’s rather generous as far as retaliation goes. Villanelle lets her stumble back immediately, doesn’t engage or pursue or even pull her guts up out of her throat. She is reformed okay?

All things considered, she’s being very kind.

“You think you’re hot shit,” Stacy slurs, dabbing at her bleeding nose.

Villanelle sticks her toothbrush back in her mouth. “I literally don’t even remember who you are.”

“You’ll regret this.”

Villanelle keeps brushing her back molars slowly, carefully. She’s serious, though. Stacy is standing there waiting for an answer to something that wasn’t even a question. “I’m lost,” she admits around the toothbrush.

Stacy smirks at her. “You’ll see.”

“I hope so. I am currently not seeing.” But then Stacy slinks off around the doorframe, disappears into whatever hole she crawled out of. Villanelle raises an eyebrow and turns to look at her own reflection in the mirror above the sink again. She doesn’t have any real friends at the moment, so her ‘do you believe that’ gesture is between just the two of them, it would seem.

  
  


____________________

  
  
  


True to his word, Gabriel honks at her from his Mercury as she’s leaving community service a few days later. He props a mimed finger gun on the ledge of his open window and pops a few imaginary shots at her. She grasps at her heart in response and lets her tongue hang out and eyes go crossed.

Gabriel laughs and reaches across the passenger seat to throw the door open for her. “Come on, I’ve got a job you can tag along on.”

“A wholesome job, yes? I’m retired from evil.”

Gabriel nods solemnly when she climbs in. “Does God know that?”

“It’s cool, we talk sometimes.” She clumsily fits her fingers into a righteous shaka hand gesture. “He says nevermind the murders, I’m welcome anytime. You know, if the whole being alive thing doesn’t work out for me.”

Gabriel barks out a laugh and reaches out to pull her seatbelt across her body and click it in. “You really need to crack a book.”

“Like, a specific book? Does god have one?” She widens her eyes at him, but he just shakes his head and peels out.

  
  


_____________________

  
  
  


It is, as far as these things go, a wholesome job. Phone god and let him know.

They drive miles and miles out from their mistake of a neighborhood until the houses grow bigger, bolder, braver. When even the garages start getting overzealous, Villanelle turns to give Gabriel a suspicious look. “Where are we going?”

“Rich lady, huge garden. We always make a killing when she calls us.”

“I’m not supposed to use the K-word.”

Gabriel reaches over and digs around in the glovebox for long moments, driving with one hand and groping blindly while the cover bangs against her knees. When he manages to produce an extra pair of thick gardening gloves with the tags still on them, he stops abusing her knees, shuts the glovebox, and drops them in her lap.

“Those are for you,” he says, switching hands on the wheel so he can lean out his window again and let the fall breeze comb his hair.

Villanelle looks down at the gloves, feeling the hardy grain and supple leather between her fingers. They’re awful small. “You really thought your hands were this small?”

“No. I thought yours were,” he shrugs.

Villanelle stares at the side of his head for a minute, then decides that’s a weird thing to do over a pair of gardening gloves. She holds them in her lap the rest of the drive.

  
  


____________________

  
  
  


When they get there and meet up with four other men from the job at the school, they greet her with their little teasing remarks, sometimes in Polish or bits of Spanish, which is funny because they think she doesn’t understand every word they’re saying.

It’s mostly nice, which surprises her after how little she’s done to deserve it.

The owner comes to let them onto the immense property, a thing that reveals itself to be several acres of heaven with a mansion planted in the middle. They’re all standing with straight spines and sparing lots of “Ma’ams” and other platitudes while she reintroduces herself as Miss Havisham or something. But the moment she turns to lead the way, Villanelle shoots Gabrielle an impressed look. He grins back and pretends to fan a wad of bills between his hands.

They’re left to prune shrubs and imported trees she doesn’t know the names of for hours while the lady of the house watches them ominously from the large bay window at the back of the house. It’s hard not to feel minorly haunted.

When they break for lunch, the owner comes down and hovers nearby until everyone’s eating their ham sandwiches very politely indeed. Villanelle looks awkwardly between the owner and her compatriots and then makes the calculated decision to take her lunch on the road.

She likes being watched, but not like this.

Villanelle grabs a second sandwich from the cooler and takes it with her while she wanders through some well and truly ridiculous arches of climbing, flowering vines and other pretty, expensive things. It’s revolting how much money is sitting in one place, under one person’s thumb. How gross it looks.

But then she thinks, would she not do the same if she had it? We are all so righteous until the money’s in hand.

As she tunnels her way out of the gardens, she thinks she must jump visibly when the mistress of the house appears out of nowhere at her side. “Jesus, where did you come from?”

“Beautiful aren’t they?”

Villanelle looks out thirty feet away where five men are eating ham sandwiches and picking chips from between their teeth. “Well. As much as any one man can be during lunch.”

“No,” she titters, “The flowers. All of my darlings.”

“Oh, your _darlings_ ,” Villanelle pronounces clumsily. “Sure, they’re nice. A little much, maybe. I don’t know if anyone’s ever told you this, but your wealth is obscene.”

Which flatters her, apparently.

“Thank you dear. I’ve not seen you here with them before, are you new?”

Gabriel is making frantic hand gestures behind the woman’s back that are probably supposed to mean something, but they just don’t. “Uh,” Villanelle watches Gabriel mime landing an airplane or something. “Yes?” She tries.

“So you’ve graduated, then?”

Villanelle’s eyes narrow and Gabriel starts doing jumping jacks but without his feet leaving the ground. Then he gestures like he’s putting an invisible hat on his head. “Mm, yes,” she decides. Parole is a sort of graduation, yes?

Miss Havisham nods pleasantly and touches at her elbow, which is probably a thing rich people do when they talk to each other. “Before hiring your company, I had no idea how much training you had to go through. Specialized college programs, masters certificates, elite training - my, it’s no wonder your rates are what they are.”

“Ah,” Villanelle nods again while Gabriel mimes...hoeing a field? Okay, she has no idea what he’s trying to say, but he should know that she didn’t spend ten years in prison and come out a bad liar. His lack of faith is insulting. “Well. We are...elite,” she says delicately.

“Oh, I’ve no doubt. In days past, I’ve hired other companies and I can’t even tell you the rabble they show up with. No respect, no delicacy. I don’t hire that way anymore.”

Villanelle tamps down her smile and nods seriously. “Why would you.”

“Why would I indeed,” she blows on the teacup she’d...brought outside. That might also be a rich person thing. “You know, one time I found out that a landscaper I had hired was on parole. He’d come from prison!”

Villanelle adopts what she hopes is an appropriate scandalized grimace. “Oh...no,” she laments. Eh, it’s a little flat, she’ll get the nomination next year. “Imagine the danger you were in.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“I mean, why do they let them out at all?” Villanelle shakes her head. “To imagine we’d trust them with our gardening and our ham sandwiches.”

Miss Havisham gives her a strange kind of look, but shakes it off and sips at her tea. “So, is this your career or are you on to bigger things? I don’t imagine your boyfriend likes that you spend so much time around so many other men.”

“My-” Villanelle narrows her eyes and flattens her mouth while she considers. “Oh no. He loves it, actually.” Behind Miss Havisham, Gabriel rolls his hands forward. _Elaborate_ , he seems to be saying, so Villanelle nods slowly. “In fact,” she improvises, “He’s really into it. It’s like...a sex thing.”

“What?”

“And I’ve been thinking lately about going into...criminal justice.” Gabriel pulls at the roots of his hair and Villanelle thinks that’s probably charades for _double down_. “Justice is my passion.”

  
  


____________________

  
  


“I’m going to k-word you,” Gabriel tells her later, half-heartedly over the top of a rose bush.

Villanelle nods thoughtfully. “Okay, that’s fair.”

  
  


____________________

  
  
  


Konstantin formally requests her presence at his closet of an office in the county building and she’s tempted to blow him off, but it would be a dumb reason to be kicked back in a prison cell. Her spite is currently not worth her freedom, but ask her again in a year and she will reevaluate.

They put her through another metal detector and into a waiting room with plastic chairs and bulletproof glass protecting the desk officer. Every time he looks at her she stares back until they’re mostly just playing ping-pong with hostile looks.

Konstantin comes to retrieve her and she hasn’t even done anything, but somehow he knows enough to say, “Stop that,” over his shoulder.

There’s hundreds of files stacked everywhere around and even at the foot of his desk and just as many legal pads half-used and scattered. “You work this late all the time?” Villanelle wonders, stopping to look at a framed diploma from some local college and a grainy photo of his family hung on the wall.

“No, I’m leaving after this. It was just a weird day,” he groans while he sinks into a chewed-up office chair. “Sit.”

“I’ll stand.”

“Sit or I send you back to prison.”

Villanelle comes over and sits dutifully on top of his desk, legs crossed and hands folded politely in her lap. She has to shunt a few things off the side to fit, but she manages it.

Konstantin pulls a notepad out from under her ass and leans back in his chair, annoyed but too noble to rise to her level. “This is our official entry meeting, so let me give you the official spiel, though I already told you most of this. You get two strikes on missing community service. You get no strikes on testing positive for drugs, but you’ll only have to drop if I have reasonable suspicion you might’ve used.”

  
  
“I don’t do drugs.”

Konstantin lets out a harried laugh. “Oh, I know. Trust me, I know the look. You also get no strikes on rearrest. If you’re charged with something - if you have to stand in front of a judge for arraignment - it’s over. They don’t care if you did it. You’ll wait for those new charges to pan out sitting right back in prison until they can’t legally keep you another day. You understand?”

“Uh, I understand. I understand that it’s bullshit,” Villanelle scoffs. “So I can be innocent and still go back to prison?”

“Yes. Because you’re on parole, Oksana. There’s no such thing as innocent.”  
  


“That is bullshit. And don’t call me that.”

Konstantin holds his hands out, palms up like she’s said something he’s willing to embrace. “Of course it is bullshit. Welcome to parole.”

  
  


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It’s dark by the time they spill out of the county building with the last stragglers, the fall daylight failing, draggin short and fading. Konstantin has a few redwell folders tucked under his arm and looks as stressed as ever. What is so hard for him? He has a car and a future if he takes better care of himself.

“Hm, now how am I getting back to the house,” Villanelle wonders, hands propped on her hips.

Konstantin turns his head and raises an eyebrow at her. “How did you get here?”

“I walked maybe a thousand miles,” Villanelle estimates. “Why did you have this at night? I am a vulnerable young lady.”

“Please,” Konstantin teases, “You will be the scariest thing on the streets. I feel bad for everyone else out tonight.”

“And not for me?” Villanelle gives him a skeptical look. “Not for me, after you made me meet you five miles from home when it was already getting dark?”

Konstantin scrubs his hand through his greying hair and she supposes that is her fault too. Everything is always her fault. “What am I supposed to do? I can’t keep driving you everywhere. I’m your parole officer, not your buddy. I have a caseload big enough for four people.”

The air picks up around them and Villanelle tries to shove both of her arms in their entirety into the pouch of her sweatshirt. “But you don’t have the heart for one me?” She laments.

“Is this how you got by in prison? Looking so sad?”

“No, I mostly bullied people.”

Konstantin throws a hand out in front of him. “Fine! Fine, fine, fine. I need to get dinner anyway because my family had to eat without me. Come on.”

“Okay, I want BREAKFAST,” Villanelle informs him as they make their way toward the parking garage. An attendant watches them warily until Konstantin raises a hand in greeting and peace and he goes back to his crossword.

Konstantin digs his hand around in the deep pockets of his threadbear coat until he manages to come up with his keys. “What? No, no. You know, I feel...eh, voyeuristic. Sitting at that counter with you and the frycook. It’s not right.”

Villanelle grins and jerks the handle of the passenger side door a few times, thwarting his attempts to unlock it for her. “Yes. Well. Cover your ears if you must.”

“Stop pulling the handle.”

Villanelle pulls it harder, repeatedly, while he jams at the button of his key fob, like the Thomas and Jerry cartoons on Sunday mornings - she fought hard for those in prison. Life imitates art.

Finally, he catches her by yanking his own door open and climbing in where he can unlock her door manually from the inside. She concedes the fight and gives him her best impression of innocence when he rolls down her window and glares out at her. “I think I’m in love, Konstantin.”

“Gross. I’m not taking you there.”

Villanelle squints at him from outside his car and stoops to fold her arms on the open window ledge. “If you take me there, I swear the next thing I buy will be a bicycle.”

He considers her for a moment and then closes the argument with, “Fine.”

Konstantin is an idiot. She’s not going to buy a bicycle.

  
  


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The sky’s in full pitch by the time Konstantin parks them in front of the diner and holds the door for her, sweeping his coat to the side and bowing sarcastically. Whatever, a bow is a bow, he loses just by doing it.

Villanelle stops in the entryway and stares at the back of a man’s head, right where she doesn’t want to see a man’s head. The audacity required to sit in a chair that is unequivocally hers could only be achieved by a man. He must be doing it on purpose, offering this insult. The ways she solved problems in prison are tools best left on that toolbelt, and yet.

Eve turns to grab a glass of water under the table and pauses with it halfway to her mouth when she catches sight of them. Her eyes flick briefly down to the man staring sullenly into his coffee cup and she puts her water glass back down. “Hey,” she directs at the invader. “Time to go.”

It takes a few seconds for him to realize Eve’s talking to him and when he does, he just blinks at her. “What?”

“Go on, get lost,” Eve shrugs like he’s the one being weird. And he definitely is, did he not see her name on the chair?

He scoffs. “I ain’t done with my coffee.”

“The coffee sucks, Brian,” Eve says bluntly, putting one hand down flat on his place setting and propping the other on her hip. “And you’ve had enough, now scram. I need those seats.”

“What the hell, Eve,” he gripes. “There’s nobody even here.”

Eve takes her hand off her hip only long enough to point over his shoulder to where Konstantin and Villanelle are watching them. “They need your seat, what am I speaking Korean? Hit the road.”

“There’s seats over there! Why do they need my seat?”

“Then take those seats,” Eve laughs. She swipes his coffee cup when he’s not looking and drops it in the bus bin under the counter, giving him a triumphant smile when he fails to stop her. “The pretty one likes to watch. Now beat it.”

Villanelle turns slowly to give Konstantin a wide-eyed look of delight, but he just seems horrified.

Brian grumbles the whole time he’s pulling his jacket on and takes an extra long time patting through all of his pockets until he comes up with a bill. When he throws it on the counter between him and Eve he levels a finger at her and wags it. “You’re an asshole.”

“Yeah, I’ll see you tomorrow,” Eve agrees.

Brian’s mouth pinches for a moment, then he deflates and nods. “Yeah, alright.”

Brian gives them a dirty look as he elbows between them and disappears into the dark. When Villanelle and Konstantin take the pair of seats he’d been sprawled across, Villanelle leans far over the counter and smiles widely at Eve, who has gone back to pretending she doesn’t exist. “I do like to watch,” Villanelle advises. “I just didn’t know I was that obvious.”

Over her shoulder, Eve says, “There’s nothing about you that’s not obvious.”

Villanelle swivels in her stool to give Konstantin another delighted look, but when she meets his eyes he quickly and pointedly puts both hands over his ears. This only serves to make her laugh.

While Eve flips an order for an older couple sitting at the singular two-top by the window, Villanelle organizes the sugar packets in the little tin. “I must know,” she directs at Eve’s back. “Do you enjoy being watched?“

Eve’s smart enough, wicked enough to wait until she’s filled the full order and delivered it to her thankful customers, all smiles and thank you’s and nice weather, ain’t its. When she comes back, her face is neutral. Careful, like she’s got a killer poker hand.

“Sometimes,” she allows.

When she’s turned back to clean the grill, Villanelle reaches up and pries one of Konstantin’s hands from over his ear. He lets her, so it’s his fault when she leans in and speaks in a low tone to him. “Did you hear that? She enjoys being watched.”

“Ugh, enough,” Konstantin gripes, swatting her away like a bug flying about his ears. “Next time you want to come do...whatever this is, I’m just dropping you off. It’s gross.”

Villanelle is halfway through taking the paper from her plastic straw and uses the opportunity to blow on the opposite end and shoot it right in Konstantin’s face. “Don’t be a prude,” she laughs while he rubs dramatically at the wound. “It’s only breakfast.”

He gives her a look like, if only, then pouts over his bad coffee. Villanelle smiles at the side of his head and reaches out to poke at his forearm. “Do you have any quarters?” She asks.

And as it so happens, she pokes him long enough for him to produce two. Villanelle snaps them up before he can change his mind and swivels around to hop off her stool. “I’ll be right back. If Eve wants our order, tell her I’ll have the usual.”

“Do you even have a usual?” Konstantin asks her as she walks away.

Villanelle waves a dismissive hand at him. “Not really. But it never works out for me anyhow, so I don’t imagine what I order will make a difference.”

In the corner of the restaurant, still hauntingly unused and filthy, Villanelle finds her target. She pops the coins in the small slot and shuffles through the little plastic album covers until she finds what she’s looking for. It comes to life at low volume, likely a permanent function, and she smiles to herself. It’s their song, she’s decided independently.

“If I had known my quarters were going to be wasted on that I would have fought you harder,” Konstantin mutters as he drums his fingers against the counter. Villanelle thinks if he realized it was in perfect synchrony with the music, he would not be so critical.

Villanelle keeps it to herself, though. “And then you would have been tired too. It is you who is always telling me to give up on everything.”

“I do not,” he retorts. “I tell you to be realistic.”

Villanelle laughs in a deep voice, as close to his as she thinks she can manage, and steals his still-wrapped plastic straw from under his arms. “Right. And being realistic during parole is so much different than giving up on everything until you die.”

He opens his mouth and she shoots the paper from his straw at his forehead.

Eve, blessedly, turns around just in time to see it. She can play it off all she likes, Villanelle sees the smile Eve has to stuff back into her mouth before it disappears. Villanelle is then presented with a plate of grotesque human ingenuity in the meanwhile.

“What is this?” She asks, horrified, wedging her fork under one of the pieces of fried toast to look underneath, grim discoveries abound. “Can I even eat this?”

“Eggs in a basket. Or egg in a hole, however you call it,” Eve shrugs. “The usual.”

“The usual? Eve, this is the most unusual.” She stabs her fork into the middle of the egg in her toast and the yolk doesn’t leak at all. “Wow, I hate this.”

“I know,” Eve says like she’s so proud of herself.

Villanelle lifts her plate and holds it out for Konstantin to see, right under his nose. “Eggs in holes!” She explains, scandalized.

Konstantin just rolls his eyes and cuts into his perfectly cooked eggs and bacon, the traitor.

“This is most inappropriate,” Villanelle concludes and takes a large bite. It’s...fine. But horrifying nonetheless.

Eve pretends like this all hasn’t happened, of course. “You’re cleaner than last time,” she points out, which is a very smooth way of innocuously perusing a lady’s person, very clever indeed.

Villanelle turns to look at Konstantin right as he puts half an egg in his mouth. “She’s used to seeing me much dirtier,” she explains and Konstantin chokes.

Eve has to go chat with a newcomer who’s just placed his hat at the far end of the bar and it affords Konstantin the discretion he thinks he needs to glare at her publicly. “Honestly, what in the fuck.”

Villanelle shrugs.

“You know I read your file right? You and I both know what I Know,” he says darkly. “I know why you’re here and I know what gets you in trouble. What got you in trouble.” He points his fork at her nose and raises his eyebrows. “Whatever is happening here: it better not be.”

Villanelle spreads her hands magnanimously above her dreadful breakfast. “Okay, but there is one very easy way to find out if what happened before is happening again.” Konstantin gives her a weird look and she holds a finger up to request his patience.

When Eve comes back to throw a few slices of french toast on the grill, Villanelle stands on the lower bar of her stool to give her more height and leans over the counter. “Eve, are you married?”

Eve glances over her shoulder and considers her a moment. “And why would that ever stop you?”

Villanelle falls back into her chair, clutching a hand to her heart. “Oof,” She says, because, aye, this is the woman of her dreams. She smiles triumphantly at Konstantin.

Konstantin is staring right past her at Eve, a stern look shadowing his features. “Eve is no longer married,” he says like a warning, but for once it does not appear to be directed at Villanelle.

Villanelle glances between the two locked in their own silent conversation, wondering where she fits in. It’s a trick question, she fits in nowhere. But if you shove a square block in a round hole hard enough, something’s going to give. It will fit eventually.

This is not a sexual metaphor, she’s just not good with the English ones.

“Hey, hey, what gives? I am feeling left out. You two know each other?” She asks, gnawing on a piece of toast she’s torn off.

Eve breaks her standoff with Konstantin and gives Villanelle a tired little smile. “Something like that.”

Konstantin lets out a single, unamused bark of laughter. “Something like that,” he agrees.

The little bell above the door goes off again and Villanelle wouldn’t have bothered looking to see who came in, but Eve freezes very abruptly. Her arms go stiffly to her sides like she’s about to salute or something and her expression becomes grim.

Villanelle looks over her shoulder to find an intimidating scarecrow of a woman haunting the entryway. She can only imagine the fatigue the woman must experience going on the marathon journey of looking down the entire length of her remarkably long nose at all of them.

The woman clears the small room in an impressive three strides and takes up the seat next to Konstantin, folding her hands over one knee and smiling what she probably thinks is a friendly smile at Eve. Meanwhile, Eve looks like she wants to throw the grease trap and make a break for it. Villanelle doesn’t know anything about what’s going on between them, but she’s used to the feeling and more than willing to aid and abet if that’s what’s to happen.

Eve swallows hard and stiffly pours a glass of water before setting it down in front of the woman with too much force so it sloshes over a bit. “What did I do this time?” She leads with.

Villanelle sits up in her chair, watching the two with obvious interest. Konstantin hasn’t looked up from his bacon.

“Nothing, to my knowledge,” the woman says pleasantly, but it still somehow has a certain bite to it. “Just a routine employment check. Address Verification. Have a cup of tea, perhaps.”

Wordlessly, Eve reaches under the counter and produces an ancient, crusty ceramic dish of yellow-stained Lipton tea bags, maybe older than Villanelle herself. Eve slides them across the counter slowly like a threat and then walks away.

The woman turns to Konstantin and smiles. “Konstantin.”

“Carolyn,” he greets his bacon. “Working late?”

“Well,” she says, pushing away the prehistoric tea bags with one finger until they’re as far away as possible, “Now Kenny’s moved out, going home seems rather pointless. I don’t even remember what I used to do there.”

“Ha!” Konstantin laughs around a mouthful. “Speak for yourself. I can’t wait until Irina moves out.”

“Isn’t she only fourteen?” Carolyn murmurs, narrowing her eyes.

Konstantin raises one eyebrow and lifts his head. “What, is that too soon to pack their bags?”

Carolyn laughs through her nose, shaking her head a bit. As she lifts her water glass to take a sip, she pauses and sniffs at it. Whatever she finds makes her wrinkle her nose and put the glass back on the counter, untouched. Her gaze slips past Konstantin and meets Villanelle’s and neither of them demure.

Still locked in her stare, Carolyn addresses Konstantin. “One of yours?”

Villanelle smiles a predatory smile. “Define yours.”

Konstantin ignores her and gestures vaguely with his fork. “Unfortunately.”

Carolyn hums to herself and Villanelle has the distinct, irritating feeling that she’s been seen straight through, weighed and measured. Then Eve comes back clutching wrinkles into a stack of timesheets that she smooths out roughly on the counter in front of Carolyn.

“Last six months,” Eve explains.

Carolyn holds out her hand over top of them and Eve passes her driver’s license across to her. Villanelle watches the whole thing happen, understanding blossoming across her expression as Carolyn hands the license back and tucks the timesheets away in her portfolio.

  
  


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Konstantin drives her home because if she gets murdered walking home, he’ll have to do a lot of paperwork about it or something. They’re mostly quiet in the dark of the conked out, fizzled street lights rusting on every unloved corner of her new neighborhood. She wonders how it looked when they were all lit, when everyone could see each other. She wonders how it will look when they’re all out and they can’t see anything at all, blind.

The car slows to a stop at the dark face of the halfway house and Konstantin idles. When Villanelle tries to unbuckle her seatbelt, Konstantin reaches out and keeps the buckle in the lock with one hand over hers.

“You get it, right?” He asks like she speaks riddle.

Villanelle looks down at their hands and back up with a raised eyebrow. “I get many things.”

Konstantin’s mouth flattens and he leans closer. “You get what that was with Eve, right? And my coworker?”

“I think so,” Villanelle nods slowly, trying to figure out where this is all going.

“Good,” Konstantin says with a firm nod. He unhands her seatbelt and leans back in his own seat to stare out the windshield. The trees shift uneasily, stirred up by the first foreboding front carrying with it a promise of bitter city winter. His nose gets buried in the scarf knotted around his neck and he furrows his brows. “Leave her alone, okay? Her parole is almost up and the last thing she needs is you screwing it up for her.”

Villanelle sends him a look that in the dark may very well read hostile. She doesn’t know. Her face just does what it does and the shadows help it none.

“You want me to protect people from you?” He asks quietly. “Fine. Back off. Eve is kind and she might have a chance,” he admits like it pains him.

Villanelle wonders what it cost Eve to convince someone like Konstantin that she’s worthy of that. The one thing she knows for certain is she will never be willing to pay that price. Villanelle will live and die, mean and unworthy because if you’ve already paid so much for that why would you start over? Why would you return it? She’ll wear it about her shoulders or heavy like a crown on her head, thank you.

Villanelle laughs under her breath, utterly humorless. “Why are you so convinced I aim to hurt her?”

Konstantin massages his brows with one hand and rests the other on the top of the steering wheel. He doesn’t look at her when he says, “I don’t think you aim to do anything. That’s your problem.” His eyes flick to the side and he catches her gaze. “I think you lay down so much friendly fire you have no idea who you’ve hurt or what you’ve broken. I think you don’t aim at all.”

He reaches over and unbuckles her seatbelt for her, then unlocks the doors.

  
  


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They’re sweeping garbage from the street gutters by hand, because apparently only nice neighborhoods get real street cleaners - when it is the not so nice neighborhood, suddenly all of the machines call in sick for work. Gabriel’s ten feet away pulling wrappers from the storm drain and Villanelle leans bodily against the handle of her upright broom, considering him.

“Do you think we deserve to be happy?” She asks him, propping her chin on the top of her broom handle.

Gabriel fists a fast food bag between his work gloves into a tight ball and looks up at her from under his sweating brow. Part of what she enjoys about Gabriel is they both know she’s weird and hard to talk to, but he never acts like it. “Eh, I don’t know. What did you do, again?”

“I had an affair with my teacher, then murdered her husband,” Villanelle explains plainly.

Gabriel nods to himself while he removes his gloves to wipe a handkerchief along his hairline. “Eeeeeeh. Maybe.”

“Maybe?” Villanelle scoffs. “What did you do, then?”

“You know, it’s weird, but I also had an affair with my teacher and murdered her husband.”

Villanelle laughs and throws a glove at his forehead. It makes a satisfying clap when it collides and flops back onto the pavement. “Shut up. Why do I bother.”

Gabriel rubs at his forehead and smears dirt across it. “Sorry, okay, okay. You’re serious, aren’t you?” Villanelle gestures vaguely because they both know she’s never closer than arm’s length from serious. “I don’t know. I mean, are you sorry? For killing him?”

Villanelle holds her hand flat and wobbles it back and forth. “Eeeeh.”

Gabriel laughs and shrugs like these are things much beyond their reach. “I don’t know. Does it matter what we deserve?” He throws the glove back at her and gives her a dirty look when she catches it neatly. “Are you going to enjoy happiness any less if you think you don’t deserve it?” He asks doubtfully.

“I’ve not had opportunity to find out. But? Probably not,” Villanelle agrees. “I’m not-so-nice that way.”

“Is this about the frycook milf?” Gabriel asks, narrowing his eyes suspiciously.

Villanelle laughs loudly and swats at his knees with the bristles of her broom. “No! I was thinking about buying new shoes!”

  
  
  


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Actually, new shoes is a good idea.

Villanelle retrieves the wad of cash she’d accumulated from its hiding place in the vent next to her bed and makes a much-needed trip to a thrift shop. It’s like trying to shine shit, but with enough creativity and unbeatable natural allure, well-

She’ll make it work.

The money slips through her fingers faster than it took to pin it down and isn’t that just life.

  
  


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In spite of everything, or maybe because of it, Villanelle finds herself in an inordinately good mood when she returns to the halfway house. Her clothes fit her again - she picked them out all on her own - and she even smells more expensive. It is, as they say, small victories.

For at least today, she feels like maybe, maybe someday she’ll see the view from the top of the hill she pushes up with sisyphean effort. Maybe, who knows? She’s feeling optimistic for once.

She’s never paid it any mind, never stepped inside it even, but Villanelle makes her way to the common area of the home where a little television sits unused in the company of an old loveseat and several quiet men gather around a low table with handfuls of cards. Villanelle smiles and makes her way over to plop herself right in the middle of them, reaching out and taking up the card deck while they blink at her.

They can blink all they like, she is very real and very good at cards.

“Don’t worry, I will deal me in,” she advises.”What are you good at? I promise I’m better, so choose wisely.”

“Who are you?” The man to her left asks.

Villanelle turns to her other side and gestures at the jokester to her left. “Do you believe him? I live here, duh.”

“Oh yeah?” He asks, squinting at her through the thickest glasses she’s ever seen. “How come I’ve never seen you before?”

“What are you talking about? We hang out all the time.”

And then she deals herself in and who even has the energy to squabble about who is and isn’t best friends. It is easier to give in.

During their second round, Roommate Stacy drifts into the room buzzing with unfed fallout and stops to give Villanelle a very long, very ugly look.

“What is her problem?” Villanelle chuckles, elbowing Charlie to her right.

Charlie tries to stealthily lean over and peak at her cards, but she presses them to her chest and narrows her eyes. Caught, but unbothered, Charlie shrugs. “No idea. She’s mean, though. I’d leave her be if I were you. A bulldog, that one.”

  
  


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They’ll only play so long with her because she wins too much and they’re men. Bruised and fragile, they eventually all drift off to their rooms for the night and Villanelle is left alone to her own devices. She manages to find an old movie playing on the television and curls up on one side of the loveseat, temple resting on the arm of it.

The empty spot next to her makes her think maybe she’d like someone there with her. But you unlearn loneliness so efficiently, so meticulously, over the course of ten imprisoned years that it’s hard to tell what’s something you feel and what’s something you invented from the people you watch on television.

  
  


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The letdown from what she thought might’ve been an okay kind of day is instant when she finds them waiting for her back in her room. Has she even been in a good mood this last decade, or is it just passing fancy, mirage and thirst?

Roommate Stacy is nowhere to be found, but two uniformed officers are standing there with thumbs tucked into their bulging, tricked-out vests and expressions grim.

“Whatever it is, I didn’t do it,” Villanelle declares as she backs slowly out of the door. “I’m not even Villanelle.”

“Oksana Astankova,” one of them accuses her, the nerve.

“I’m not her either,” Villanelle tries, but she backs right into a third officer who’d come up behind her in the hallway. He puts a hand on her shoulder and she slips from under it to back into a corner of her room. “Okay, okay, I have done the crime, but I think you’ll be finding I also did the time. So we’re square, Officer Friendly. Check the receipts.”

“We received an anonymous tip and found these in your mattress and coat pockets,” another says, holding up a handful of tightly wrapped plastic baggies of…

Oh, jesus motherfuck.

“Those are not mine,” Villanelle bristles, holding her hands up placatingly. “I don’t do drugs! My life is already one unceasing bad trip, I promise.”

“Ma’am, please turn around, hands flat on the wall.”

“What? Why?”

It’s such a stupid question, she knows why. She’s been found at a crime scene before, she knows the drill, aye. The good mood. It was very misleading, very not fair.

They corner her by the dressers and she’s honestly too confused to fight back, too numb, blindsided, bamboozled, all of them at once somehow. They ask her if she has anything in her pockets that can hurt them and her mouth automatically responds, “I wish.”

It does not make them so gentle with the handcuffs.

Her feet fall one in front of the other as they push her out by her shoulders, telling her something about her right to being quiet for the legal things. She’s been quiet for the legal things and she’s been very loud for the legal things, and she is duty bound to report that neither does much of anything. You might as well just do what you want and fleetingly, she thinks she might like to scream.

“Konstantin!” She shouts when she spots him rotating in distress on the parkway, looking every which way like he can’t figure out where to be helpful. When he hears her, he turns, eyes wide in the dark. He’s not much as far as allies go, but it’s a small relief to see him looking harried, even if it’s mere change to her dollars.

Konstantin jogs toward them as though he wants to intercede, but demures when the officers stop and look him up and down. “I’m her parole officer,” he explains, holding up both hands. “They called me.”

“You can come to arraignment tomorrow,” one of them says dismissively, pushing her toward a gently strobing cruiser. “She’ll be charged and held overnight.”

“Charged?” Villanelle asks in a choked, too-high pitch. “I didn’t do anything! I cannot be charged - then I go back in the box. I am very done with the box, sir.”

Konstantin swivels in front of them, still holding up both hands and putting himself between the cruiser and the officers. “Can I ride with her?”

They’re all quiet, the only sound is a high-pitched screaming noise - oh wait, that is in her brain. Her brain is screaming. Yes, she always imagined she would fuck this all up, but she did not so much imagine that she wouldn’t fuck this all up.

Did god really smite her?

Fucking rat, they are so not cool now.

“That’s not really standard operating procedure. I don’t want her thinking you’re representing her in any capacity. It’s bad grounds for false statements,” he rattles off, shuffling his feet and jostling Villanelle with his anxious movements “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

Konstantin shakes his head eagerly. “No, no. No statements, no - none of that. I just want to be there when you process her, okay? I promise. It’s your show.”

The man’s partner thumps a hand against his shoulder and gives him a shrug. “It doesn’t really change anything. If he wants to ride, let him ride,” he decides, gesturing toward the cruiser.

She gets manhandled inside with a palm against the top of her head and the cuffs pulling achingly against her shoulders. Being in a cage in the back of a car doesn’t feel any different than a cage in a building. “Fucking fuck,” she hisses, kicking her foot hard into the seat in front of her before the cops get in and charge her with that too.

Konstantin climbs in next and gets locked in the cage with her, the brave man. So noble. So old. “I don’t need your help,” Villanelle lashes out at him, baring her teeth. “You’re with them. You’re not on my side.”

“I’m not on a side,” Konstantin patronizes her. She wonders if cogs in a machine know they’re in a machine or if they just think they’re doing a super job of spinning pointlessly in place. He leans close and gives her a stern look, as always. “What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything,” she hisses back while the cops fill out paperwork and talk casually about the end of her life over the hood of the cruiser outside. Oh, it must be so nice to play spectator to the end of her fucking world. “Drug test me! I don’t do drugs, Konstantin.”

“Oh, I will. This definitely requires you to drop.”

“Fine! I will piss in a hundred cups. I’ve been set up,” she seethes. “Where is their proof?”

Konstantin scrubs both hands into his forehead and up into his hairline. “They don’t need proof. Possession is a crime. You spent ten years in prison, how is this news to you?”

“The news is not what possession is, Officer Smartass. The news is that I possessed anything at all,” she rages, pulling at her cuffs and chafing her wrists badly. “Those aren’t mine! What am I supposed to do?”

“I...don’t know,” Konstantin deflates. Slowly he falls forward in a groaning exhale to rest his forehead against the seatback. “I don’t know,” he repeats.

“Okay. You do that. You sit there and don’t know. I’ll just go to prison for another seven years, yeah?” When Konstantin doesn’t respond, she shuffles over the center seat between them and rams her shoulder into his.

“Hey!”

“Don’t you _hey_ me. You don’t get to check out, this is my life, Konstantin! I’m a bad night’s sleep away from spending more of my life in prison than out of it.” She pushes up into his space, eyes searching for something, anything in his that she can hold to, lifeline or not. “Can’t anyone - I don’t know, vouch for me? Can’t anyone help me?”

It’s actually the sad little look he gives her that lets her know - more than the red and blue lights, more than the drugs and the search of her person, the hand on her head as they’d pushed her into the cruiser, and the hours she’d spent reading legal textbooks just because she’d read everything else in the three-shelf library in the cellblock upwards of a thousand times.

It’s that sad little look that lets her know it’s over.

“Am I going back to prison?” She asks dully as the officers climb into the front seat.

Konstantin sighs and says quietly, “I don’t know.”

  
  


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She’s put in the temporary holding cells at the precinct, alone while the nextdoor cell is uncomfortably cozy with male detainees. Villanelle supposes she’s supposed to be grateful or something that she’s the only woman who has decided to get themselves arrested that night.

It gives her more room to pace.

From corner to corner, to the sliding barred door and back to the stainless steel bench and all over again, she prowls for what feels like hours. It might be - there’s no light, no windows, and when she calls out nobody answers her. It crawls under her skin like larvae until she wants to scratch right through until it bleeds.

How can freedom be so terrible and, still, she feels its loss like a devastating chasm in her chest. Like someone’s stuck clamp jaws between ribs three and four and each hour they wrench the screw handle harder, wider.

Villanelle stands in the back of the cell, sets her forehead against the cinderblock wall and puts herself in timeout.

If she doesn’t, she thinks maybe she’ll break her hands on the steel walls. And if she’s going back to prison in the morning, she’s going to be needing those.

“Over-easy?”

Villanelle turns her head slowly in place, until her forehead slides off the wall and she can look over her shoulder. Eve is standing there, still dressed for work, hands stuffed into her lap apron and head cocked to the side, bold as brass.

“What?” She asks flatly.

Eve chances a glance around the bullpen, then steps closer looking suspicious. What is she so suspicious of? If Eve’s really been to prison, then she’s seen a person in crisis before. Move along, frycook.

“You’ve been out, what, two weeks?” Eve asks with disbelief. Maybe it should make her feel better that Eve is surprised or even disappointed. Nobody’s ever expected so much of her.

Villanelle turns bodily and sags against the back wall, hands pressed into the cold cement behind her. “I’m not in the mood.”

“What did you do?”

Villanelle gives a little petulant roll of her eyes and lets her gaze slip off to the side. “I didn’t do anything, okay? It...doesn’t matter. Nothing matters anymore.” She glances back and gets caught in the way Eve studies her.

They maintain very heavy eye contact while Villanelle lets her heels slide forward slowly, slowly, slowly over the course of a long minute until she slips down onto her butt on the cold floor with a comically serious expression. She folds her hands in her lap. “What are you doing here? I cannot make you laugh today, Eve.”

A corner of Eve’s mouth lifts in sympathetic grimace and Villanelle realizes she’s a hypocrite as well as an idiot. The laughing has arrived nonetheless.

“Okay fine, but no more,” Villanelle says sternly.

Eve wraps a hand around one of the bars and peers through the gap at her. “Are you going to tell me what happened or do I have to assume you did something bad?”

“My ugly roommate put a bunch of drugs in my bed and clothes and called the cops on me,” Villanelle recounts glumly. “I’m having a bad day. And if I had to guess, I think I’m about to have a bad ten more years.”

Eve’s hand tightens, strains against the cell bar and she stares intently into Villanelle’s vacant expression. Whatever she finds there, she eventually nods to herself with an air of resoluteness. She points a finger at Villanelle through the bars and commands her, “Stay here. Hang tight.”

Then she walks off so quickly that Villanelle is left to comment loudly to nobody in particular, “What else would I be doing?”

  
  


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As the hours drag on, Villanelle begins to wonder if she hadn’t hallucinated Eve. It’s a better explanation than seeing a paroled frycook hanging around the local precinct like it’s a hobby. And Eve doesn’t come back, so what else is she meant to think?

She somehow falls asleep there, curled up on the floor of the holding cell and it’s as much a testament to the terrible places Villanelle has managed sleep as it is to the weight the day had placed on her.

She’s only drawn out of it when someone starts yelling in her ear, nudging a boot into her side. If they had any idea the hairpin trigger they’re stepping on, they probably wouldn’t. She’s done so much worse over so much less.

“Remove your boot or I will remove your foot,” she mutters into waking.

“Get up, you’re being released,” someone says in that cop voice, the way they do.

But the words sap the sleep from her system and she’s sitting bolt upright while they jump away. “I’m what now?”

  
  
  


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The officers pass her like a baton to Konstantin near the entryway and he takes hold of her around the back of her neck, breaking away for the last hundred meters and walking so quickly, surely he takes first. She only manages to squirm out of his hold when they’ve walked out the front doors into the deep, early hours of the morning. The crowd goes wild.

“What just happened?” She demands.

Konstantin looks like he hasn’t slept, but the droop under his eyes is more relieved than anything else. He reaches out and pushes lightly against her shoulder like he’s surprised to see her in all of her corporeal freedom. Okay, okay, she is too, but there’s no reason he should be.

“What?” She asks again.

Konstantin shakes his head in disbelief and draws his coat tighter around himself against the nighttime chill. “They disappeared.”

“What? Who?”

“Not who - the drugs. The drugs disappeared.”

Villanelle jerks back and looks in through the precinct curiously. “What, like abra-kadabra? How the hell did that happen?”

“I don’t know, chain of custody broke and they couldn’t find them. And then your roommate apparently withdrew her statement, called in and said she made it all up. They decided it wasn’t enough to charge you, wasn’t worth the procedural screwup being dragged through court.”

“Wow,” Villanelle breathes, sifts her fingers through the hair at the top of her head and lets the relief wash through her. “Wow, wow, wow.”

“Wow is right,” Konstantin agrees. “I did tell you to make friends, yes? So I am taking credit for this. Don’t mind if I do.”

“I didn’t,” Villanelle defends herself. What else is one meant to do against such accusations. “I’ve made no friends, I promise.”

Konstantin gives her a wry look. “Yes you did.”

He leaves her standing there, swinging his key ring around his forefinger while he walks off toward the parking lot. Villanelle has to take a few skipping strides to catch up and that’s when it dawns on her. “What, Eve?”

He gives her a humorless smile. “I simply have no idea.” Villanelle wants to wring it out of him, but he deflects her before she can. “But you still have to come to my office and drop.”

“What, why? You heard them, I am an innocent angel.”

Konstantin laughs loudly, the fuck. “I heard that someone botched their charges against you. I did not so much hear about an innocent angel. And if I had, I would never believe they were talking about you.”

“That’s because you’re an unimaginative bastard.”

“It is,” Konstantin agrees. “Now come piss in a cup for me.”

A more romantic offer, she has yet to receive.

  
  


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It is all much less romantic when Konstantin fails to mention that he’s not allowed to hand her the cup and wait for her to deliver the goods. Instead, because she’s a girl, she must be passed off without warning to Carolyn Martens in the County Building. Why Carolyn Martens is at the County Building at 3:00 in the morning is apparently of less concern than the idea that Villanelle might’ve done drugs without ever being in possession of them.

Bureaucracy is exhausting.

Konstantin goes to his office and then she’s left alone with Carolyn and whatever wench keeps her spine wound to unparalleled tensions. Carolyn holds a plastic cup out to her and asks her to initial it, which she does.

Then she leads her to the bathrooms.

And follows her inside.

And stops the stall door from slamming shut when she tries to close it.

“Oh, may I help you?” Villanelle asks sarcastically, standing in front of the toilet and feeling the absurd need to defend it. “I am trying to urinate.”

Carolyn nods, which is good. Villanelle is glad to be in agreement about this at least.

“I know I’m weird, but I prefer to do this alone.”

Carolyn shakes her head, which is most unfortunate. “Sorry, the standard operating procedure is that I have to watch. Don’t give me that look, I promise you I’ll enjoy this less than you will.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Villanelle grits out, turning back toward the toilet and bracing both hands on the opposing walls of the thin stall. As it turns out, it only takes a few weeks to equalize the distressing lack of boundaries prison skins you down to. She’s done all manner of degrading things in front of people she’d just as soon feed to the wood chippers and yet somehow this moment at 3 a.m. in front of Carolyn Martens feels like stripping the marrow from her bones. She eyes the toilet with mounting anxiety.

Carolyn sighs like maybe she can read this and takes a step back. “I’m sorry,” is all she can really offer.

Villanelle gives her a shaky look, cobbled together bravado and shot nerves, whatever that looks like when it spills out onto her face. “I think I’m having performance anxiety,” she jokes, but it falls flat.

“Pretend I’m not here.”

So whatever, Villanelle can put it away. She’s spent ten years putting things away, because that’s the thing about prison:

You can’t have nice things. You can’t even have bad things! 

Villanelle drops herself onto the toilet and stares at Carolyn in what she can only hope is a deeply unsettling way. “Do you prefer eye contact?”

Carolyn sighs. “Please don’t.”

“I’m going to.”

  
  
  


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Villanelle’s already feeling fragile and prodded when she leaves Carolyn’s office, so she takes a moment in the hallway outside of Konstantin’s workspace to take a few deep breaths and find the parts of herself she knows don’t bruise easily. These face outward, always. It’s only good sense.

As she stands there, she hears Konstantin laughing and talking back and forth, slipping in and out of Russian. It only takes a minute to realize he’s talking to his family, warm in a way she’s never heard him.

She’s not a good person, you know?

It doesn’t make her happy. It twists her up inside and makes her want to lock the door and drop a lit match to see what happens. Instead, she does the only thing she knows how to do to protect people from herself.

She leaves.

  
  


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A cab takes her to the halfway house and then takes her last few dollars. She has nothing again, but it’s a feeling that, if not comfortable, is at least familiar. She can’t even afford to tip him and she must look like real shit for him to just tell her to forget it and have a good night.

She won’t!

But he doesn’t care, why bring it up?  
  


It’s funny because she hates that motherfuck of a house on 8th, but there’s a fragile, sleepy part of her that starts to daydream about her bed as she slogs up the stairs into the lobby. It might even feel like coming home, maybe. You know: if she covers an eye and squints from far away.

Right there in the lobby, she stops her. The Residential Manager, the grand duchess herself with her perm thirty years late and her award-winning customer service smile. The smile is not so much there at the moment. A box is resting at her feet, open and hastily stuffed full of awfully familiar items.

“I’ll be needing your keys back,” Her Highness declares.

Villanelle squints at her, brain foggy. “What?”

“Per the residential agreement you signed upon moving in, arrest is immediate cause for a termination of residential agreement and immediate eviction.”

Villanelle leans over the woman, close enough to smell the product in her curls. “Oh no. You are not giving me the boot at three in the morning when I’ve done nothing. Call them, there were no charges. I am going to bed.”

“Russ!” Her Highness calls behind her, looking harried while she shrinks back.

Russ is a very large man, makes them all feel braver when he enters the room, she is sure. He looks tired, but there’s no mistaking he’s made up his mind when he crosses his arms and gives her the look.

“For real?” Villanelle balks.

“Don’t make me have to throw you out,” he threatens. “You think they’re going to like picking your ass up again tonight?”

“Well they might as well! I don’t have anywhere else to go,” she blusters. “I didn’t even do anything!”

“I’m sorry,” Her Highness lies. “Our rules are clear. You have to leave the premises.”

Villanelle laughs in her face, loud enough to make them all uncomfortable. “Okay, great! And what the fuck am I supposed to now? Drop dead?”

“Keys please,” she demands bravely, open palm between them.

Villanelle throws them as hard as possible at her nose.

  
  


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As she’s standing out on the sidewalk between the house and the parkway, a fucking bitter wind lifting under her coat and her knuckles gone white wrapped around the sharp corners of her box, Villanelle decides that this is a good time to scream and not even a very bad place to be doing it in.

So she does.

A light goes on in one of the units in the house behind her and birds lift in a panic from a nearby tree and this all feels very good, because hey, at least somebody sees her. At least somebody hears her.

Villanelle finishes it off with a grand finale, hurling the open box in her arms out onto the sidewalk so her cheap clothes and picky little pocket items spill out, roll away, rest in the dirt and asphalt.

She met a girl in prison - okay, she met many girls, it was so boring, what else was she supposed to do? The girl had burned down almost twenty buildings before someone caught her on a home security system and put her away and somehow she always had such pretty things to say about it.

The girl was completely mental, mind you - Villanelle found this to be a very attractive quality in the company she kept, when she chose to keep it at all. And Villanelle did not so much understand the fires or the pretty things the girl said about them, but for the first time, she remembers her and thinks she understands what the allure might be in burning it all down, every last bit of them. All of them and everyone they know and everything they love. Everyone who’s ever had anything, made her green with the want to take it. There is a truth we must swallow and it’s that there is no way to have and not flaunt. Somehow, somewhere, your pretty things and the people you love are taunting a person with much, much less to lose, they’re salivating with it.

The girl had been nice enough, anyhow. Mental walks a fine line, day by day, she thinks. Hey, we all need hobbies.

God, she wants to hit something.

When she looks up, of course, of course Eve is standing there and she thinks maybe she lets out some strange, garbled shout of karmic impatience. “Jesus, where are you always coming from?” Villanelle asks the empty neighborhood. “How do you always find me?”

Eve is still wearing her work uniform and that really does make her question if this whole thing hasn’t been a hallucination after all. Is she still in prison? Wow even in brain death she is so unimaginative: it is still just a sexy lady and bad times, as always.

“You find me, like, all the time,” Eve counters, hands bunched up in her apron pocket. She looks exhausted and if Eve looks like that, Villanelle dreads to think what she herself might look like in the moment.

“Where you work,” Villanelle defends, throwing a hand up. “Do you even own any other clothes?”

Eve purses her lips. “No.”

Villanelle really doesn’t know what to do with that, so she leaves it on the sidewalk between them with her scattered belongings. By everything she has left in her, she wills the burn behind her eyes away, crushes it down as far as it’ll go because she doesn’t do that shit.

She makes a noise that might be a laugh to see if it’ll help and it doesn’t. Eve watches her carefully.

“Have you ever had a bad day that turned into ten bad days and then ten bad years and then you woke up one day and realized that you’ve had more bad years than good years? I mean that,” Villanelle says earnestly. “I really mean that. Like, the honest to god majority of your life has been insufferable and you’ve never admitted it to yourself. Is that normal?”

Eve’s gaze falls somewhere near her feet for a quiet moment and the birds come back to settle into the tree. They’ve decided she can’t do anything to them and they’re right.

Finally, Eve looks back up at her. “For people like us, yeah.”

“Why do they even make people like us?” Villanelle groans, letting her head hang back until it pulls at her neck too tightly. “Honestly? I think if I could just feel even one thing that makes me think maybe I can remember how to be happy, I’d be okay. That’s it. Just like one thing, you know? I can’t catch a fucking break.”

Eve nods and it’s nothing - it’s barely anything, but it’s also not. For whatever it’s worth, even if it’s worth nothing, Eve may very well get it. She’s standing there, after all, against all reason and obligation and certainly nobody else showed up. If Villanelle was a better person, she’d feel bad for being happy that Eve is in the shit with her, but she’s not and she doesn’t.

Villanelle stands there and watches while Eve comes forward, bending down onto her knees and devoting her attention to collecting up Villanelle’s belongings. Eve rights the box and braces it against the harsh wind with her knee to begin filling it. She folds Villanelle’s clothes and examines each item before it goes in, fragile items cushioned, everything fit neatly in its place like it’s all valuable to her.

Eve doesn’t look up during this process, not even for a second. And Villanelle hates, hates how they both know she’s doing it so nobody has to see when Villanelle wipes her cheeks and takes the few minutes to press her face into her coat sleeve and swallow the burn at the back of her throat. She hates that Eve won’t ever speak of it, neither of them will.

By the time Eve stands up with the box cradled in her arm, it’s like it never happened at all. Any of it, even the things Eve might’ve guessed were happening and that’s something they’ll both just have to live with.

Villanelle clears the distance between them and reaches for the packed box, but before she can grab it, Eve bends down and gently puts it on the sidewalk next to her feet. Villanelle’s hands are already outstretched and hang there awkwardly grasping at nothing. Before she can figure out what’s happening, Eve wraps one arm around Villanelle’s neck and the other up under her arm and around her back, bringing her into what she believes is commonly referred to as “a hug”. So she’s been told.

She’s forced to stoop, bend over Eve because she’s been pulled that way, propped on Eve’s shoulder like she’s not dwarfing her. Her hands dance, unsure and unpracticed behind Eve’s back for long, horrendously awkward moments. Eve must feel it, know it, but she doesn’t unhand her.

“What the hell is this?” Villanelle asks, muffled into Eve’s shirt. Shut up, shut up! She can’t help herself, she is a shit.

Eve breathes out, content even though it has to be the worst hug she’s ever had to suffer through being reciprocated. It’s enough to compel Villanelle to meet her halfway, bring her arms up and squeeze - that’s what you do, right?

“Hm,” Villanelle says after a minute. “Oh, okay.” She lets her weight rest more fully on Eve, leans into it heavily and sags when Eve just picks up the slack. “That’s very nice, thank you. You smell like pancakes.”

You’re probably not supposed to talk so much during hugs, she’s not sure, but she finds herself asking. “When am I supposed to let go?”

“Whenever you want.”

  
  


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You will be pleased to know that Villanelle did eventually let go, but it will not be disclosed how long that may or may not have taken.

When she does, Eve pretends this is all very normal and just bends down to retrieve Villanelle’s box and starts heading off toward the street with it. “Come on, Over-Easy,” she beckons.

And the sun is almost kind of rising and a felon she barely knows is leading her toward a rusted out Buick parked on the street with her last few belongings. It is probably a good time to be remembering stranger danger.

But what else is there?

“Should I be following you?” Villanelle asks cautiously. “What did you go to prison for?” It’s a pointless question, of course. She’s already on Eve’s heels, drawn along by some thin tether, maybe her last. It is better to follow a line to your death then be set adrift.

Even in the pre-dawn haze, it is most clear that Eve has won. For all the ugly cars Villanelle has ridden in or passed in their neighborhood since release, Eve’s car is, hands down, the most ugly of them all. Congratulations to her.

“Murder,” Eve answers casually.

Villanelle watches her load the box in the back seat, then catches her eyes over the top of the car. “Oh me too. This is awkward, one of us will have to change.”

Eve rolls her eyes with a small smile in the corner of her mouth.

She’s not really sure why she gets in the car, but she does and then Eve starts driving and that’s that, she supposes. Villanelle tries to recline the seat, but that might not have been a function even back in whatever decade the car came off the factory belt. She sighs and slumps further back into the seat. Every minute closer to sunrise it gets more difficult to fight the autonomic way her eyes want to roll back into blessed darkness.

“You can just drop me at the nearest height steep enough to kill me,” Villanelle requests politely.

Eve watches her from the corner of her eye, one eyebrow raised. “No,” she declares, so bossy. “I don’t really have like...a bed or anything. But I think I have a sleeping bag somewhere? And like, four walls and a roof which is better than you’re doing now, no offense.”

Villanelle swings her head to the side and smiles sleepily in Eve’s direction. “No thank you, the nearest steep height please.”

Eve locks the car doors. “No,” she says with equally sarcastic, saccharine charm. Eve has no idea what she’s done. She’s locked them in the car with two whole murderers.

  
  


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	3. part 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the wait, i was hurting people with my other story. this is my apology. thank you for reading xo

____________________

part 3

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Eve stops her car in front of a brick-front wedge of a building. It’s just cobbled together stone and crumbling mortar, a sloppily painted step-up porch in harsh navy and yellow leading up to an establishment called  _ Sid’s Crabshack. _

“Do you require...crabs? At five in the morning?” Villanelle wonders, free of judgment, of course. When a woman needs crabs is of course her own business.

Eve puts her car in park, wrenching an awful noise from the engine, an ignored plea for blessed retirement. “Hm? Oh. No, it’s a bar. They don’t sell crab. Or any food except pretzels.”

“It’s called  _ Sid’s Crabshack. _ ”

“That’s a fair point,” Eve admits, for whatever that’s worth. When she catches Villanelle’s apprehensive expression, she gestures vaguely, resigned, as it were. “I live here.”

Villanelle narrows her eyes and flattens her mouth into an appropriately grim expression. “I am thinking now would be a good time to tell me if you’re a crab.”

The fact that she never receives an answer to this is just one of many troubling aspects of their written history.

“Come on,” Eve sighs, climbing out of her car and not really leaving Villanelle many options. She’s carrying Villanelle’s last worldly possessions. Ambivalent, Villanelle exits the car and follows Eve toward the side alleyway. A murderer. Toward the alleyway behind the bar, no less.

She keeps her reservations to herself as Eve pulls the groaning fire escape ladder down, down, hanging her whole weight on it for long moments before it wheezes into motion and slips forward to rest against the ground. Villanelle’s treated to a humorous fantasy of the ladder never coming down. Eve dangling, kicking her legs for hours. Screaming maybe.

She stifles her laugh and Eve beckons her up, up the ladder to a nearly invisible door sunken inconspicuously into the side of the building, just above the crabless crab shack. Eve unlocks it from her key ring and pushes inward into a cramped studio apartment.

It’s a testament to minimalism. Or a memorial to trying one’s best, perhaps. Making do. No offense or anything.

The whole space can be summarized thusly: a tragic, low riding twin-sized bed against the far wall, a television just scraping by this turn of the century sitting on a cardboard box, a tiny closet of a bathroom, and too many bookshelves filled with too many books in every corner they can be crammed into. It’s very ugly. It’s very cute.

“This is…” Villanelle watches Eve set her box of belongings with great care in a spare corner. “You pay for this? By yourself?”

Eve looks up, cheeks flushing in shame or pride, it’s hard to tell. “Yeah? Who else would pay for it?” She rubs the back of her neck and winces as she joins the stationary tour, glancing at the pile of unshelved books teetering near the television. “Sorry. I know it’s ugly.”

Villanelle kicks her shoes off, because that seems polite, and drifts over to a bookshelf, tripping her pointer finger along the spines of a shocking expanse of genres. “It is,” she agrees vaguely. Her eyes sweep the place again, marveling. “But it’s all yours.”

Eve cracks a smile, amused as she leans against the wall and watches her. “You don’t have to pretend to be impressed.”

“No, I don’t,” Villanelle concedes to that too. “Is it loud above the bar? When they’re open?”

Eve’s chin tips. “Yes.”

“Hm.”

“I like it,” Eve confesses, unprompted. “I like how loud it is.”

Villanelle smiles wide and though they both come from a place where sharing is a dangerous baring of one’s throat, it feels good to share this.

  
  


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It’s late - early - somewhere in between. The tour that’s not a tour is cut short, and Eve rummages around until she produces a plaid sleeping bag, rolled tight and stowed under her bed. She presents it to Villanelle like the passing of a torch and that feels right for who they are.

“I slept in that for almost a year after I got the boot from the halfway house.”

Villanelle sighs and hopes she’s only inheriting the item, not the story. “You were kicked out?”

“I’ll let you in on a poorly kept secret: everyone gets kicked out.” She sets a pillow on top of Villanelle’s armful, spreading her hands on top lightly and leaning in. “It’s designed that way.”

“This country is very poorly designed. Have they noticed?”

“Actually it’s designed very well,” Eve shrugs, smoothing her hands over the top of the pillow to iron out the creases. “It’s designed to pull a curtain around people like us. If you don’t see it, you don’t  _ deserve _ to see it. Such a guilty thing, we are. And if you do, you must’ve deserved that too.”

Villanelle runs her fingers along the material in her hands and turns her head to watch through the window as rats parade about the alleyway. “Well. If they knew I was behind the curtain, they might think different.”

Eve rolls her eyes playfully, but she doesn’t disagree.

“What happened after you got kicked out?”

“What didn’t happen?” Eve breathes, shaking her head as she steps away to clear clutter from the floor by shuffling it into different corners. The space she arranges is under the windowsill, best seat in the house. “Couch surfing, the YMCA a few nights, even the restaurant until the owner caught on and told me I couldn’t sleep there. She’s the one who hooked me up with this place. Her brother Sid owns the bar. Eats up most of my money, but that’s life I guess.”

“Is it?” Villanelle wonders quite honestly. “Is  _ that _ life?”

Eve smiles sweetly and it comes of great surprise to her. The comfort it brings. “Sometimes. And then sometimes it’s not.”

“What gets you out of bed in the morning?” Villanelle mutters.

“That sometimes it’s not.”

Then Eve supervises the unrolling of the sleeping bag under the good, south-facing window of the flat like she’s signaling the runway approach of a jet. It’s a smooth landing. Smooth  _ enough _ , Eve readjusts afterwards but she’s just micromanaging. Villanelle isn't even allowed to climb into it unsupervised and that leaves her trapped in a pocket on the floor with the lip pulled up to her nose, staring up at Eve and wondering what comes next.

Eve’s brow furrows and she props her hands on her hips for a moment, staring down at her. She makes up her mind and strips the top throw blanket from her bed to cast over the sleeping bag. It’s nice. The apartment is drafty, struggling radiator bolted to the wall, wheezing, and still it feels like it’s losing. Villanelle bunches the blanket up to her nose and offers a muffled, “Thank you.”

“Are you warm enough?”

“Yes,” Villanelle lies, she knows better.

Eve watches her a bit longer, eyes sharp. Then she pulls another layer from her bed and drops that over Villanelle too, clumsy charity though it may be.

  
  


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They’re painting penises. Well. They’re supposed to be painting  _ over _ penises on the public way, but Villanelle keeps painting more. Their supervisor is spiraling into a paranoid rage as the harder they work, the more flagrant the penises.

Gabriel tells her to knock it off, so she paints a giraffe instead. Giraffes have spots, right? Suddenly she forgets what a giraffe looks like. She paints long dogs with spots.

At some point, she finds time to explain what happened to her the previous night in all its grueling details, minus the parts where she almost fell to pieces, because nobody can know how close she was to laying down in the street and waiting for a ten wheeler to flatten her brain. It’s an unsexy image.

“Isn’t that weird?” She finishes.

If it is, he does a bad job of showing it. “I think it’s actually a pretty common story. You’re lucky yours turned out different. Most don’t.”

“No, the thing with Eve. Isn’t  _ that _ weird?”

Gabriel doesn’t answer her right away. He’s always so careful with his words, picked out special, shined, placed neatly, proud like a display. In the interim, he makes broad strokes with the ruddy paint the City had almost matched to the defaced brick they’re working on. It’s too expensive to remove, they paint over it in dissimilar colored patches across the sides of City buildings like grafted skin. When he’s covered the giraffe, he turns and shrugs.

“Eve’s a smart lady.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“That she’s smart.” And isn’t that cute of him.

“She’s a fry cook,” Villanelle mutters like she’s so qualified.

Gabriel reaches out and wipes his hand across the back of her overalls as he’s been doing all day.  _ His _ clothes are too nice, he says, but she thinks he’s just trying to see how many buttons he has to push before she dunks his head in an industrial gallon of paint.

“A smart fry cook. She made use of her time in the halfway house. And she meets  _ everyone _ at the diner. Money isn’t the only wealth in a neighborhood like this and as far as friends go, she’s a good friend to have. Don’t be obtuse.”

“Would that I knew any other way,” Villanelle laments. She paints a frowny face in red paint on the side of unmarked brick and mimics it when Gabriel glares. “If she was smart she wouldn’t have taken me home. I know I’m gorgeous, but I’m far from a stray puppy. She’s being an idiot.”

“Maybe that should worry you then,” he says smugly. “If she’s not afraid of you, maybe it’s because she’s much, much scarier.”

They grin at each other and Villanelle thinks Gabriel knows how it tickles her. “That would be very sexy indeed.” The supervisor paces by tugging at the roots of his hair and they have to pretend to be very committed to public service again. “Do you think she wants something from me?”

Gabriel laughs loudly and they have to duck back into work to avoid being yelled at. He glances at her sideways. “You have nothing. Remember?”

“I know. That’s why I’m confused.”

Gabriel raises his eyebrows, looks her in the eye and tries to assert, “You know sometimes there are just good people. It’s rare, but it happens.”

“And what? You’re suggesting I trust  _ that _ ? Is this real advice or are you hazing me?”

Gabriel shakes his head like she’s not getting it. She thinks maybe she’s not, but neither is he. “All I’m suggesting is you don’t bite the hand that feeds. Try to find a part of yourself that still remembers that, okay? I bet it’s in there somewhere.”

“That’s a bad bet.”

  
  


____________________

  
  
  


Eve’s at the diner and that’s about the only thing Villanelle can count on these days. Behind the counter, aching miles away with her used shoes, unassuming. Simple, but not. Mysterious, but not. Eve flips through the classifieds of a newspaper, which is an absurdly endearing thing for a normal human to do. Villanelle smiles at the sight, enjoys the fact that she doesn’t even look up to greet new customers.

Her pockets rattle with the change from her lunch, so she uses her moment of anonymity to parse through the plastic track cards in the jukebox until she can find what she’s been assured is the best American song ever written, though she’s beginning to have her doubts.

The song comes on and Eve looks up with a peeved expression, but it softens just a little, maybe, when she sees her. Villanelle smiles back as Eve salutes with her spatula, then takes her seat directly in front of the grill.

“What’s with you and this song?”

Villanelle folds her hands together on the counter. “It’s our song.”

“I hate this song.”

“Don’t be like that. You like  _ me.” _

“I hate you too.”

Villanelle wags a finger at her and grins. “You had your chance for that and you blew it.”

Eve turns her back just to hide her smile, but it’s a moment too late for it.

There’s an elderly man at the window, cutting his shortstack into tiny, prim bites and bobbing his creaking neck along to The Cars and that’s the extent of their company. When Eve starts spooning puddles of pancake batter onto the grill in great quantities, they both know it’s to end a conversation.

They know, but Villanelle doesn’t play by those rules. “Why did you let me stay with you last night? I’m not a very good person, you know.”

Eve covers the grill in pancakes, twenty or thirty maybe. They’ll go to waste and not just because nobody’s going to eat them. Villanelle doesn’t bite down on things she plans to let go. Not conversations and not people.

Halfway through the process, Eve peaks over her shoulder and must be disappointed to see Villanelle is still staring at her expectantly. “Well, neither am I,” she offers.   
  


“Are you sure? You were accused of it today.”

“I killed my husband, you know? It was mostly an accident.”

Villanelle catches her eye again, but this time she holds fast and Eve sits with it like she’s snared. “No it wasn’t,” Villanelle decides. She can see it there, it’s written across Eve’s face. She sees it because it looks back at her from every mirror, every morning.

Eve purses her lips, then ticks her head to the side. “Well. That’s what the jury said.”

Villanelle laughs, spreads her hands on the counter. “Okay, you’re very wicked then. We’re awful, the two of us, suit yourself. I’m very rude and you’re very vindictive in your cooking. Why did you help me?”

Eve takes her time flipping over each pancake, there’s no room for error. She’s crowded them so tightly, each flip is a risk and each success is a memorial to repetition. Muscle memory. She could do it blind, maybe. It takes only a minute to finish and not a single one smudged. 

Eve wipes her hands on the towel tucked into the front tie of her apron. “I’m not really sure,” she ponders, considering her grill top like it has the answers she’s looking for. “Nobody ever helped me. Sometimes you just need a break.”

“I always need a break.”

“Yeah, but sometimes that’s really the only thing standing between us and blowing it.”

“Oh. Yes, always,” Villanelle agrees. She drums her fingers against the table and Eve watches the motion. “I’m very bad at this part.”

Eve swings her spatula in a loose grip and watches her apprehensively.

“The thank you part,” Villanelle elaborates. “I’m bad at the thank you part. I don’t have a lot of practice.”

Eve scoffs and waves her off. “Please. Don’t practice on me.”

“Okay.” And she won’t, it’s an honest relief not to. Kindness feels like a thing everyone else absorbs, but she must be handed, heft awkwardly, hold until she can find somewhere to put it down when nobody’s looking. It helps that Eve didn’t hand it to her so much as huck it at her forehead. It still kind of smarts.

Eve seems relieved too. She starts stacking the bountiful harvest of pancakes on several plates for nobody in particular.

Villanelle takes the opportunity to pick at the paint smeared across her overalls, fingerprints like rusting blood across her chest, back, knees. “When do I leave?” She wonders. “When do you want me gone?”

“I don’t want you gone, so I don’t know,” Eve says.

Villanelle laughs under her breath, rattles the button lock straps of her overalls to fill the silence. “You will. Or I will. Tell me when.”

“You talk too much,” Eve says bluntly and it makes her laugh in earnest, because  _ that’s _ never been something she’s been accused of. “I’ll tell you when. Stop making it weird. You’re staying with me, or near me. Whatever helps you get over yourself.”

“I don’t need a savior. I don’t  _ want _ one,” Villanelle bites. Iit feels important to announce. She’d like the world to know it, would rent billboards if she had the money.

Eve gives her an unimpressed look and it cows the growl building at the back of her throat, kennels the rabid bite she can’t help but take at anyone who tries to come close. “I’m a pretty good option, then. Because I’m about as far as you can get from that.”

The fight leaves as quickly as it came and Villanelle slouches down onto her propped hand with a pout while Eve puts a plate of pancakes in front of her. “I don’t get you.”

“You wouldn’t, would you?” Eve taps her finger in front of the plate to draw her attention and sighs when that fails. “You will. You don’t get it now because you don’t remember what it’s like outside of a cell. I’m old enough to remember. Now shut up and eat these pancakes. You’re looking thin.”

Villanelle can’t help the endeared, disbelieving smile that cracks her expression. “How would you know? You haven’t known me long enough.”

“I know things. More than you, I’d bet. Eat or I won’t be nice to you.”

“You’re not nice to me anyways.”

“Bah!” Eve scoffs and goes back to cooking food for customers that aren’t there. The man at the window is only halfway through his plate and the bites are getting smaller, like he doesn’t want it to empty. His expression is blissful.

Villanelle takes her cue and cuts into her own stack, buttermilk, flour, eggs, and grease. She’s not entirely hungry, but the last thing she wants to look is thin. Eve knows things, apparently. That must be nice.

Eve glances over her shoulder every minute or so and eyes her progress with a threatening kind of care.

  
  


____________________

  
  
  


It’s deep into nightfall when they get back, has been for hours as fall robs them of daylight. A cold wind buffets them as it cuts harshly between buildings and races through alleyways to blow up under tightly cinched coats. When Eve stumbles back a step, Villanelle automatically braces her with a hand at her lower back and accepts the grateful smile even as it slips a knife into her tether to port. Unmoored, adrift.

It feels like she’s chasing that feeling when she stops Eve from jumping up to grab the fire escape ladder and pulls it down for her. She holds it steady until Eve reaches the top, though it’s something Eve’s probably done a thousand times without help.

Inside, Eve clutches her bag to her chest and gives Villanelle an unreadable look. “I did something bad,” she reveals.

Villanelle nods - they do walk that course, the two of them. “Besides murder?”

With something that could almost pass as guilt, Eve rummages in her bag and produces a styrofoam container, holding it out for her. “I fried and stole a bunch of bacon.”

Villanelle barks out an unattractive crow of victory as she snatches up the container and lifts it above her head, grand prize that it is. “You have never been sexier than right now. I knew I hit on you for a reason.”

“You play the long game very well,” Eve concedes and later, sitting on pillows in front of the boxy television while a mindless cooking competition plays on crackling speakers, crunching through crispy bacon and sipping eight dollar red wine from wax paper cups, Villanelle wonders if that isn’t true in some way. A laundry list of bad leading right here, right to this. Fate doesn’t exist, of course, but it also does because things are always going to end up one way and not another.

Eve spoils prematurely that a man on one of the teams is forced to quit the competition early, then apologizes immediately, she couldn’t help it. She’s unused to sharing these evenings.

“Is this what all of your nights look like?” Villanelle asks and she thinks it might come off as jealous, but how’s that when she’s sitting there too? This is  _ her _ night too.

Eve seems about to confirm it, then pauses and turns to blink at her. “Well, no. I’m usually alone.”

Villanelle tips her head to the side, nods vaguely. “Me too.”

But they’re not - they can’t be alone together, they’ve blown it.

  
  
  


____________________

  
  
  


She first sees Konstantin again lurking outside of community service roll call and she means to ignore him, she really does, but his eyes snap to hers and he begins a very deliberate march in her direction. She lets it happen, taking comfort in the fact that she’s holding pruning shears and has little to live for if he starts to chafe on her patience. He should be so much more careful with her. Everyone should, what are they thinking.

“Where the hell have you been?” Konstantin leads with - things are going very poorly already.

Villanelle swings the shears up onto her shoulder so he is sure to see them. “Why?”

“I just found out you got booted from the house days ago!”

“Oh, that must have been so difficult for you,” she patronizes, flicking her hair over her shoulder as she turns halfway to leave. He’s wrapping his coat tighter around himself - it’s gotten so cold, see? Villanelle remains sleeveless, looks him in the eye and dares him to shiver in front of her in the moments before she takes her leave.

“Hey!” He calls when she’s already ten paces off. She doesn’t stop and his voice grows faint in the yawning space between them. “You need a permanent address, Oksana. Where the hell are you living?”

The name chafes worse than he does, he has  _ not _ earned it and neither has she. She glances over her shoulder at him and flicks her wrist. “The moon.”

  
  
  


____________________

  
  
  
  


She doesn’t think about it that hard - or at all - when she twists her fingers harshly into the back of the man’s coat and jerks him back a few steps. Away from her.

He’s weasley, swimming in his clothes and reeking of days old cologne and this is all tertiary to the way he’d been speaking into Eve’s space like it’s his. The way he uses his body to keep her from escaping with her bin of dirty dishes. The way Eve deflates with weary relief when she sees her come in and the bell announces it. And Villanelle didn’t think about much more than that.

She uses his jacket to swing him away bodily and whatever indignant comeback is on his tongue dies at the look on hers. “She’s working,” Villanelle says darkly. “Piss off.”

He tries to appeal to Eve, giving her a wounded kind of look, but Eve just grimaces and looks away, so that settles that. He leaves quickly, shoving past Villanelle in the process, though she sidesteps the check and he nearly eats it. When he’s gone Villanelle cocks her head to the side and digs her nails into the work gloves bunched in one fist. 

Eve looks less relieved. “Jesus, don’t manhandle people. You’re on parole.”

Villanelle frowns and looks off toward the grease-warped baseboards to escape Eve’s condemnation. “I don’t like the way he was talking to you.”

“Yeah, join the club,” Eve mutters, hoisting her bin to get a better grip. “I’m used to it.”

“I will unacquaint you with it, then.”

Eve is shaking her head before she’s finished her sentence, like she’s already read this script. “No. You’ll keep your hands to yourself. And your ass out of jail.”

“You’re mad at me?” Villanelle scrunches her brows together and tries to put the scene back together in her head. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m not mad at you,” Eve sighs and pushes the bin of dishes into Villanelle’s arms. “You can’t lash out at everything, okay? I can handle myself. I’ve been doing it a lot longer than you and I haven’t broken parole. I need you to use your brain.”

“My  _ what?” _

Finally, Eve cracks a smile and Villanelle feels the better for it. She reaches up and pushes a finger against Villanelle’s forehead, not entirely gentle. “Use that, please.”

Yes and when has that ever worked out for her.

  
  


____________________

  
  
  


“This isn’t a thing, you know.”

“Yes. Please give me no qualifiers. I live for the ambiguity of your thought processes.”

Villanelle cocks her hip and crosses her arms, but the effect is lost because she has a dish brush in one hand and Eve isn’t even looking at her. “You’re so crabby.”

“Yeah, our lives suck. You want my advice? Be crabby when you want to. It helps,” Eve says under her breath. She’s pouring over the punctured remains of a thousand tabs punched through the metal receipt cache next to the register in an attempt to balance the cash drawer. “What isn’t a thing?”

“Me doing dishes. Being your  _ busboy. _ I don’t do dishes.”

“Oh, you’re a  _ catch, _ ” Eve swoons.

Villanelle glares down at the steel wool brush, mouth twisted. Even in this, she never feels she is winning. “This is your job, not mine.”

“Yes it is,” Eve agrees and again, it feels she’s lost the thread.

Villanelle sneaks a look over her shoulder, because that’s the only way she’ll catch Eve using the ugly reading glasses the owner keeps in the back of the register.  _ It’s just the receipt paper _ , Eve says,  _ I can see fine. _ She’s old! Let Villanelle have this, at least. They argue about it constantly, Eve is a poor sport.

The glasses are horrendous and she is enthralled.

“I am a catch,” Villanelle pouts.

Eve looks up at her over the hideous glasses, sympathetic in appearance only, never intention. “Oh, me too then.”

“We deserve better,” Villanelle decides, tossing the brush into the well of the sink.

“Then what? Each other?”

Villanelle thinks about it for a moment. “Yes.”

Eve laughs, slamming the stack of receipts back through the metal stake hard enough to catch them all. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  
  


____________________

  
  
  


“I did your dishes!” Villanelle calls when Eve returns to her apartment the following evening.

Eve pulls her shoes off, but leaves her heavy parka on, always cold. She trundles over to inspect the sink and nods. “Wow, two cups and a fork. Would you consider going full time?”

“This is why I don’t do dishes! Ungrateful wench!”

Eve smiles and it pushes her red cheeks up above the folds of her tightly wound scarf. “Thank you.”

“Make up your mind,” Villanelle gripes half-heartedly.

Eve shrugs and pats her on the back as she goes to hold her hands over the radiator like she always does. “I have.”

  
  


____________________

  
  


It turns out she is a busboy, just one lie amongst the many she’s told herself. This one had been most convincing until she walked in after mulching church flower beds all day to find Eve swimming in a roaring crowd. It is only roaring because the restaurant is barely bigger than a studio apartment, but it roars nonetheless.

Standing room only.

Villanelle pushes roughly past some college kids standing around the lone table by the window and swims up through City workers in their coveralls and orange vests just to catch a glimpse of Eve flipping pancakes like it’s an olympic sport. Maybe it is, Villanelle’s been a little disconnected for the last decade.

She squeezes up to the counter and pounds the bell by the register a few times, earning an irritated look. It fades as recognition sets in, then Villanelle is treated to the rare sight of Eve looking at her like the second coming. It explains what follows, albeit poorly.

“Oh, thank god,” Eve breathes, sawing her dishtowel against the back of her neck to mop at the sweat there. “Hey, I need a hand.”

“I don’t cook.”

“And you don’t do dishes, either.”

Villanelle groans and leans over the counter to survey the growing stack of overflowing bus bins like a minefield under Eve’s feet. “Oh, no,” she declines, hands up, backing away. “I don’t do that.”

“Please?” Eve begs,  _ begs! _ That is not something she should be squandering, but it works so well. “I’ll give you the lion's share of the tips tonight.”

Villanelle is already circling the counter with a defeated slump to her shoulders. “I don’t do dishes,” she insists weakly as she prepares to do dishes.

Eve looks like she could kiss her and fine, do it, coward. Instead, she beckons Villanelle close and when she’s within striking distance, Eve loops the collar of an apron over her head, though she has to stand on tiptoes to do it. Villanelle stoops and allows it, biting her cheek in a scowl. Before being released, Eve holds her there by the apron straps smiling at her.

“Thanks busboy.”

“I hate you so much.”

“You look great, I’m very proud of you.” Then she shoves a bin of slobbery plates and utensils into Villanelle’s stomach. It might’ve taken the wind out of her if there was any left.

  
  


____________________

  
  


The dishes never end. It is, as they say: loaves and fishes miracle, only it’s not a miracle and she wants to die. Her hands bloat and wrinkle, knuckles nicked raw by steel wool and bargain chemicals. She smells like dishwasher crud.

Eve makes pancakes like they’re going out of style and every time she looks up, she brightens and makes a stupid face in Villanelle’s direction. Villanelle is competitive. She makes a stupider face.

When Eve passes by her with plates, she elbows her side or squeezes her shoulder or just brushes against her and it strikes Villanelle that Eve is happy there. It strikes hard, transorbital lobotomy, an idea, a  _ knowing _ , like an intruder pushing into Villanelle’s brain.

Eve is happy here. She is happy making pancakes, living in a crab shack that doesn’t serve crab, biding her time, existing. She’s happy to have Villanelle in that bubble. She just  _ is _ and it’s baffling.

Happiness is like a thing she’s learned to command, it is because she says so.

Villanelle pulls the sprayer dangling on a bungee hose down, aims it at Eve’s back and fires. Eve glares back and drags her spatula across her throat slowly, threateningly.

Villanelle wonders if someone looked at her right then, looked at how little she had and how full she felt with it, would they be baffled too?

  
  


____________________

  
  
  


The loaves and fishes run out eventually - they don’t tell you that in the jesus book. Nothing lasts forever, thank god.

Or you know. Thank whoever.

There’s just a handful of Eve’s utensils sitting at the bottom of the basin when Konstantin pushes in well after closing. Eve cuts a sideways look at Villanelle, then addresses Konstantin blandly. “We’re closed.”

Konstantin ignores her. “I knew I would find you here. You need to tell me your permanent address, Oksana. I have to report you as vagrant if you don’t.”

Villanelle is tired, her hands hurt. She says nothing as she lazily scrubs the grease from Eve’s spatulas and thinks that when she doesn’t look at him it’s almost like he isn’t there at all.

“Oksana-”

“2300 South Elm,” Eve cuts in. “She’s living with me.”

Konstantin falls quiet and so does Eve and there is a very small part of Villanelle that’s curious what this might look like between them, but it feels distant. She’s tired and she wants to go home. As the grill cools, so does the diner and even the tight space starts to chill.

“Submit it in writing,” Konstantin says eventually, but Villanelle thinks she’s missed the most vital parts of the conversation. The parts that weren’t spoken out loud.

“We will,” Eve says like a threat.

The bell chimes and he’s gone.

When at last she clears the sink, Eve comes up at her elbow with a rubber band-rolled wad of cash outstretched. “As promised.”

“Keep it,” Villanelle waves her off, but Eve catches her wrist and pushes the roll into her palm.

“I hired you and I can fire you too,” Eve cautions.

It’s fine, Villanelle just slips the roll into Eve’s hanging apron on the way out when she’s not looking. She’s not a busboy, okay?

  
  


____________________

  
  
  
  


They fill out forms together because most things in her life don’t proceed without a gun to her head. And Eve is a fully loaded revolver to the temple, one she’d squeeze just to see what’s in the chamber.

“If you catch a warrant for something as stupid as not filling out a change of address form, I’m going to deliver you to the warden myself.”

“I’m taller than you,” Villanelle reminds her, because it’s never a bad time for that.

“I’m meaner than you.”

Villanelle scrunches her nose doubtfully and when she slides her gaze to the side, Eve is wholly focused on the form pressed flat on the floor. There’s nowhere to write on, the kitchen more clutter than counter, so they’re hunched over the floorboards in front of the television. When Villanelle heaves a bored sigh and rests her chin on her hands, lying on her stomach, her ribs bruise against the wood.

Villanelle watches Eve work like it’s a program on television.

As Eve scales the form to its bottom, she pauses and furrows her brows with her pen hovering above the page. “Your birthday’s on the third?”

Villanelle’s eyes swing upwards thoughtfully and, “Oh. Sure, it must be. If that’s what it says.”

“Not a big birthday kind of gal?”

Villanelle shrugs. “Well. Birthdays aren’t really for us. They’re for people who love us. So no, there’s never much birthday.”

“Yeah, I’m not either,” Eve reads between the lines.

The conversation is over, surely, but Eve spends another long minute staring at the date on the form and Villanelle thinks there’s not much she wouldn’t trade to know what Eve is thinking about. She wonders when Eve’s birthday is, but can’t find the courage to ask.

Why would she need to know?

The act of asking reveals too much, showing your hand before calling last bet. Idiotic.

  
  


____________________

  
  
  


It wears on her unexpectedly, though. She thinks about it over the next few days, finds herself studying Eve when they’re together like a thing unidentified or unrecognized by science. When they’re apart, she thinks about her more. If it sounds romantic, it’s not. It grates terribly.

Villanelle is a creature of want and take and she doesn’t know if she wants and she doesn’t know how to take.

Oh, what’s become of her.

When they’re finished mowing soccer fields for the private schools on the other end of the city, she flounders at the offer of a ride home. There’s too much to think about there and she tells Gabriel as much.

  
“Trouble in paradise?”   
  


“Is it paradise if there’s trouble?” Villanelle asks.

Gabriel nods, scoffing at her questions. “Of course! You love trouble, you’re practically made of it.”

Villanelle can taste that sentiment when she smacks her lips and decides that must be true. “I’m trying to figure out how to love someone, I think. You’re married, aren’t you?”

A smile blooms on Gabriel’s face, brilliant and honest and handsome, it’s a good fit. “Would you like to come around and meet her?”

So she does.

  
  
  


____________________

  
  
  


Marie makes them hot chocolate from scratch and brings it to them on the cement pad patio behind their tiny sandwich box house. It’s cold, but they stoke a smoky fire from tinder sticks and indoor logs in the metal grated camping pit to hold their hands over. Gabriel orbits Marie, hangs on her words. Gabriel is whole in that backyard in a way she’s never seen him whole before. The missing piece.

It must be nice to walk around only missing just that one piece.

Villanelle narrows her eyes at him and scoffs. “When we first met: you didn’t want to know where to sell cocaine. You were hazing me.”

“Yes,” Gabriel grins.

“You never killed anyone either.”

Gabriel laughs and rests his hand on her back as he rocks in merriment, tickled she could have ever believed him.

Villanelle stays much too late, outstays her welcome perhaps, but it feels good to be caught in their orbit and she doesn’t know how to make her own.

  
  


____________________

  
  
  


It’s  _ much _ too late when she gets back. Sid’s is on last call and she’s slinking in toward the alleyway like a feral cat when she spots Eve in the smoker’s lounge. There’s a security light beating harshly on her head and a standing ashtray that’s been ignored for years and some man sways into Eve’s space while they talk.

He’s drunk, maybe. His hands are big and clumsy when he tries to wrap Eve’s fingers into his own and she slips out from between them before he can keep her there. It doesn’t dissuade him at all, he just presses the hand over Eve’s shoulder into the brick to lean closer. She shifts away.

Eve probably only has one moment to register what’s about to happen before it happens, so neither of them should waste time pretending she could have stopped it. Villanelle grabs the man’s wrist and twists it from the wall up behind his back so far it’ll hurt for weeks if he’s lucky. His back locks and he lets out a shriek of surprised agony, then Villanelle relents and shoves him away.

“Villanelle!”

Eve thinks this is negotiable? She’s the one who’s supposed to know things.

She gives Eve a calm look, expression vacant. Is she expected to feel sorry?

The man curses her out when he catches his feet under him, winding himself up into a fury. All Villanelle feels is deadly calm.

“Go home,” Villanelle tells him.

Eve steps in front of her, pushing a hand back into her stomach to keep her from attacking. “Sorry. I’m sorry. She just - we’re all just kind of drunk. She thought…”

It’s not truthful. Villanelle did not think.

“Whatever,” the man decides, swiping a hand in their direction like they’re not worth his effort. He heads back into the bar and the night hadn’t been quiet before, but it’s somehow louder in the vacuum left behind.

Eve turns slowly, eyes dark pits even in the flicker of the security light. “What the fuck was that?”

“I don’t know, Eve. What the fuck was that?”

Eve opens her mouth, then shuts it, closes her eyes and breathes deeply through her nose. “That guy is a  _ cop _ .”

“I don’t care. I don’t like how they touch you.”

Eve’s eyes open again and her gaze is even, pointed, purposeful. “Well maybe you should’ve told me where the hell you were all night so I wouldn’t be out here trying to find out if you were dead or in jail again.” When Villanelle doesn’t say anything, Eve throws a hand up, waves it about. “I thought you were dead!” She repeats.

Villanelle scoffs. “And?”

“ _ And _ ,” Eve echoes, incredulous. She inhales sharply and holds up a finger, shakes it with wordless rage - she wants to school her but can’t find the lesson plan. When she does, it takes Villanelle by surprise. “And you don’t have my permission to die.”

“I don’t do permission.”

Eve sneers. “And I don’t do  _ that.” _

“Do what?”

They stare at each other for a long while and Villanelle finds herself revoltingly pleased that Eve doesn’t back down. She wants her to  _ pull the trigger. _ She won’t go easy, but she thinks she’d like Eve to wrestle Villanelle away from herself, sweep her feet and pin her down and take.

But Eve wouldn’t wrestle her for anything. Even in taking, you give so much just by virtue of caring enough. And Eve has never struck Villanelle as a person who gave what hasn’t been earned.

“Who was he?”

Eve calms, deadly like still air before natural disaster. “I told you, this is what I do. I learn things. I know things. And how I do that is none of your business.”

Villanelle grinds her teeth together and feels it. She feels the missing parts of herself like the dilapidated foundation of a house, rotting support beams and crumbling concrete and all the ways she’s tried to replace these things. They don’t make bandaids that stop collapse.

“I was worried about you,” Eve continues, voice still calm but picking up like ocean swells. “So I want you to think really hard about why it’s okay for you to skulk around like a street dog all night without so much as a text, but the second I look at someone else, you act like I’ve slipped the leash.”

Villanelle sneers at her because that’s all she’s got left. When she looks over Eve’s shoulder she can practically see the man’s handprint against the wall, the ghost of his space shrouding hers and on instinct Villanelle reaches out and puts her own hand over top of it. Eve allows her the intrusion just like she’d allowed him and Villanelle wonders if it feels any different to her.

“I don’t like the way they touch you,” Villanelle finds herself saying again, skipping needle on a record and if she can’t fix this, if she lets it skip and skip and skip like it’s been skipping for weeks, they’ll never clear this song.

Eve blinks slowly, presses her fingertips backward into the wall behind her. “Well how should they touch me then?”

It’s a collapse when she kisses her, there’s no other way to describe it, a full structure keeling sideways, mortar imploding, roof shingles peeling off and away and saplings sliding from full gutters as they capsize.

Villanelle is a  _ liar _ , even in this. Even with her mouth filled with Eve’s. 

It’s not how they should be touching her at all.

Villanelle pins her to the wall and kisses her forcefully because she’s gotten it wrong again. Want and take. Ruined.

Eve’s hands clench into her shirt and for all her strength, for all her grit and inability to yield, she bends willowy and fragile against the storm. She’s gentle like she knows Villanelle needs it and that somehow makes her feel worse as she curls hands around the outline of her neck.

Villanelle bites into Eve’s lip like she’s trying to prove a point. She already has.

She doesn’t deserve this and she wasn’t built for it.

Villanelle flees.

  
  


____________________

  
  
  


Fleeing is more effective in a car, unfortunately. And so is chasing.

The Buick crawls along behind her for some fifteen minutes, and she knows Eve, so she knows it’s probably meant to be funny. Even after everything, the intent to be funny is Eve’s worst quality, especially because she’s not even good at it.

Villanelle ignores her and finally, the car swerves and pulls up next to her to crawl at her weary pace. The window rolls down.

“Where are you going?”

“Mind your business.”

Eve rests her forearm on top of the wheel and gives Villanelle a long suffering look. “You are my business. Would you get in the car?”

“No.”

“You don’t want to be my business?”

Villanelle’s face scrunches and she kicks a rock with her shoe. “You have too many business. I don’t want to share.”

Eve sighs and drums her dangling fingers on the tip top of the dashboard behind the wheel. “Are we really doing this? I’m way too old.”

Villanelle pauses and glances in Eve’s direction for the first time. “You’re beautiful,” she defends.

Eve gives her a weird little smile. “Yeah. I just meant I’m too old to chase you around because you’re throwing a tantrum. Get in, I just want to say something to you. That’s all.”

She’s cold and she’s curious and neither of those things are going to be solved without getting into the car, so Villanelle gives into it. If Eve’s surprised at her compliance, she hides it.

Villanelle turns in her seat and watches Eve expectantly.

The car stops and Eve pivots her body so they’re facing each other as much as the seats allow. “I just want to tell you that I’m not going to let you use me to hurt yourself. That’s what your doing, did you realize? That’s not what I’m here for. And not what you deserve.”

Villanelle narrows her eyes and opens her mouth, but Eve cuts her a warning look.

“So. If you’re going to come at me like you think you’re the big bad wolf, I need to be real fucking clear that I’m not little red riding hood. I’m the wolf, okay? I’m not tragic and neither are you.”

“You’re...another wolf?” Villanelle clarifies, if somewhat dubious. “ _ Small _ wolf.”

“I can still fuck you up,” Eve promises and Villanelle finds she believes it. “So if you’re going to kiss me, do it to feel good or don’t do it at all. I’ll bite your fucking face off.”

Villanelle laughs, she can’t help it. She’s pretty sure she was meant to.

  
  


____________________

  
  
  


By the time they get back, it’s the kind of late that comes preloaded with a hangover before you’ve even done anything to deserve it. It’s mostly Villanelle’s fault, but neither of them say it. Neither of them say anything, it’s too close to morning.

Eve drops her keys on the counter even though they both know she’ll spend long minutes panicking that they’re not on the key hook by the door when she tries to leave for work. Neither of them say that either.

Eve climbs into her bed with her clothes still on and rolls to face the wall. Villanelle stands there in the middle of the room like she doesn’t know where she fits anymore. After a few minutes, Eve senses it and grunts, “What?”

Villanelle climbs into Eve’s cramped little cot, wedging herself into the space at Eve’s back while Eve maintains a long stream of groaning complaints. She barely clears the dropoff on the side of the bed and she has to bend her knees into Eve’s space to keep her feet from hanging off the end of the mattress.

“This is very uncomfortable,” Villanelle diagnoses.

“Yes it is,” Eve says slowly, deliberately. If she’s trying to be clever, it’s much too early in the morning for that.

Villanelle stares down at the back of Eve’s shirt, how it slips off the outline of one shoulder blade and obscures the other, then she reaches out to pinch the fabric between her fingers. She just wants to touch, that’s all.

“Sorry. I just like you a lot, apparently.”

“I know.”

Villanelle smiles, because  _ oh, _ she knows things, does she? “That must be nice. Knowing things. Some of us have to go around not knowing things.”

“All you have to do is ask.”

Villanelle laughs and presses her forehead into the center of Eve’s back. “Yeah. I’ll get to it. I’m working up to it. Isn’t that embarrassing?”

“Yeah. Keep that to yourself.”

Villanelle won’t! She doesn’t know how, it will come forth at the most inconvenient moment, they can both be sure of that.

“Aren’t you even a small bit afraid of me?” Villanelle pouts, tugging on Eve’s shirt. “I’m very good at breaking things. You’ll see if you haven’t already. I could break you.”

Eve sighs and her voice is groggy when she mutters, “Don’t flatter yourself.”

“It’s not arrogance, it’s true.”

“It’s arrogance,” Eve confirms. “You’re arrogant. And...long.”

Villanelle flexes her toes over the edge of the bed and yeah, she’s kind of long. Okay, okay. “I just want to be near you.”

“Fine.”

Villanelle lets silence stretch out between them and she’s tired, she really is, but she’s also wide awake. They’re so close and if she can just go five more minutes without saying something stupid, Eve will drop off into sleep and Villanelle can get away with it all. But that’s asking so,  _ so _ much of her.

Villanelle leans closer to Eve’s ear and lowers her voice. “My grandma, what big teeth you have.”

Eve’s arm propels backward, her elbow connects, and Villanelle finds herself shoved off the mattress onto the floor.

  
  


____________________

  
  
  


A rain begins in the city and they think it’ll last a while, they think it’ll linger and it does, but much more oppressively than the weatherman on channel 2 could’ve ever guessed. It puddles normally, then when the city hits saturation point, new lakes terraform in the gutters of low streets and unlucky folks’ backyards. Basements flood. Cars drive slowly through marshes to spare their exhaust and then they stop driving entirely.

If you don’t have to leave your house, you don’t.

Community service is on hold and there’s no outdoor work to be found, so Villanelle spends her time sitting in the diner watching Eve clean the grill over and over. Customers are infrequent and they’re left watching rain batter the diner’s storefront windows, run rivers from the gutters.

They trade a stubborn cold between them for a few of the days and Villanelle learns that when you put the back of your hand against a person’s forehead, it’s not about being able to tell the temperature, it’s about letting them know you wish you had a thermometer. And that’s kind of sweet too.

Business slows to a crawl at the diner and they spend their days smelling wet oil in the parking lot during the day and trying to find the perfect constellation of pots on the floor in Eve’s apartment to catch all of the leaks in the roof at night.

Eve teaches her how to flip pancakes.

She ruins nine out of ten of them every time and Eve tells her “good job” after each one and means it.

  
  


____________________

  
  
  


Then her birthday arrives and neither of them wakes up with the cold they’d been swapping, they must’ve misplaced it somewhere. Villanelle doesn’t intend to mark the day, doesn’t even remember it specifically, but Eve brings it up the second she opens her eyes. She must have been thinking about it, these things don’t just happen upon you at 6:00 in the morning.

“Happy birthday.”

“Okay.”

“Hey are you awake?”

“Depends.”

“I got you something.”

“Then I’m awake,” Villanelle decides.

Eve leads her down the fire escape in her slippers - you must know: they have sheep on them and Villanelle is afraid to poke fun for risk of Eve never wearing them again. At the bottom, Eve produces keys and lets them both into the back service door of the empty bar. Upward pointing stool legs crowd the counter tops and the space is lit by only one eerie backup light. Villanelle spends an awful lot of time following a murderer into dark and haunted places.

In a room stacked high with kegs and boxes of domestic beer bottles, Eve flips a lightswitch and it takes Villanelle a minute to realize her gift isn’t the world’s largest stash of Miller Lite.

“Oh. For me?”

“Yeah, I said it was for you. Who else would it be for?”

It’s a mattress, leaning in a slouch against the far wall. No frame, they’re not made of money okay? Villanelle walks up to it and puts both of her hands flat on it, rubs them around, wax on, wax off.

Eve comes to stand at her side in her sheep slippers and crosses her arms, nodding with a kind of vague, expectant satisfaction normally reserved for successful crop yields. All in a day’s work.

“Thank you,” Villanelle sighs, turning and leaning back into the upright mattress, flopping her hands back against it.

Eve shrugs, plays it off. “It was your money. The tips you won’t take.”

“Thank you anyway.” Villanelle reaches out slowly and peels one of Eve’s folded hands away from her body to swing between them, beautiful, awkward connection, like only they know how. Eve allows it and Villanelle grins. “Did you get this in a dumpster?”

Eve nods. “Yeah.”

  
  


____________________

  
  
  


She goes to work with Eve again, there’s nothing much else to do and Eve doesn’t think she should be alone on her birthday. Whether that’s a sweet sentiment or a cynical commentary on her disciplinary track record is a matter of how recently Villanelle pissed her off. Today? It is sweet.

The Buick’s windshield wipers swipe so frantically they look like they might fly off and still Villanelle sees almost nothing of the road through the windshield. Eve drives with one hand on the wheel, looking bored. Either they’re plowing through backyards and childhood pets and Eve simply can’t be bothered or she’s all but memorized the route after all these years. Neither would surprise her.

Villanelle holds an umbrella over Eve’s head while she opens the diner, though there’s hardly a line. In fact, it’s just them and the sound of rain pinging off of a tin roof. Deafening, but quiet.

Eve turns on the low murmur of AM radio, sleepy conversations about liminal space that might as well be in unspoken languages. She reads a newspaper of all things, archaic and charming. Villanelle steals the comics from the back and ruins the sudoku puzzle by missing an 8 somewhere in the corner and putting another in its column, writing too large in pen. The rain doesn’t let up.

A plate slides in front of Villanelle as she surrenders, scribbles black across the puzzle to ruin it fully, torch the thing. Two over-easy eggs like eyes, a pile of bacon underneath, torn and twisted into a sloppy smile. A second plate slides in next to it, two small pancakes with a candle stuck in the middle.

Villanelle looks up and Eve is twisting a towel behind her neck nervously. Nervous is a new look on her. Nervous betrays the apathy Eve wears like a heavy coat against the cold.

“Happy birthday. Sorry it’s...uh, kind of boring.”

Villanelle stares down at the plates. “For me?”

“Who else?” Eve puffs out her cheeks and keeps her gaze out the window behind Villanelle’s head. “I’m sorry.”

“Why are you sorry?”

“Because I don’t have much else to offer. This is kind of all I have.”

Villanelle drums her fingers on either side of the plates and purses her lips. She thinks it would be nice if they could do this while looking at each other. “You told me the other day that if I wanted to know things, all I had to do was ask.”

“That’s right,” Eve says quietly.

Villanelle picks up her fork and pokes the top of the egg until it punctures and bleeds. The perfect over-easy egg.

If it doesn’t make a mess, she’s not interested.

“Would you let me kiss you again? Hypothetically.”

Eve’s gaze snaps to hers and maybe they’re both surprised by the directness of it. Tag, you’re it.

Eve holds both her hands out, gesturing at the plates of food between them like an answer. Villanelle props her elbow on the counter, wagging a finger at Eve. It won’t do, she should know.

Finally, Eve relents, heaving a sigh. “Yeah. That’s...that’s what the-” She gestures more aggressively at the plates. “It’s what breakfast means. That breakfast in particular.”

Villanelle studies her, squints playfully as she leans forward over the plates until Eve begins to look uncomfortable. “Do you even like me half as much as I like you?”

Eve’s cheeks flush and she gestures aggressively at the plates between them.

“Only half as much?” Villanelle laments.

Eve puffs up, hackles raised and it’s cute, it really, really is. “What? Please. Anything you can do, I can do better.”

Villanelle beams and wedges her forearms between the plates, pushing them outward and clearing her place setting. Eve has just enough time to begin complaining -  _ she’d made it special, you brat _ \- but brat gets swallowed when Villanelle reaches across the counter, wraps her fist in the collar of Eve’s apron and pulls her forward into a kiss.

It’s weird for a minute, they both laugh as their teeth click and Eve strains on her toes to clear the counter between them. If you haven’t had a bad kiss, though, what’s the point in having a good kiss. They try again, one more time, and find something better.

It might be bandaids on rotting supports, cracked studs and craft glue, but it  _ feels _ like pouring a new foundation. And if that’s not true, what’s the harm in pretending it is? Lies are some of the sweetest things we tell ourselves.

Eve holds her cheeks when she pulls back and studies her carefully, each feature given a moment of her time. “But only for your birthday,” she says sternly.

Villanelle wraps her fingers gently around Eve’s wrists and gives her a cheeky smile. “No it’s not.”

“I can’t run off with every twenty-something who professes their love for me.”

Villanelle’s mouth drops open indignantly. “What other twenty-something is in love with you? I’ll kill them.”

Eve rolls her eyes and dips back in to kiss the murder from her mouth. She feels three decades of grease under her forearms and a decade of loneliness lifting from her ribs like...oh, something cheesy. It always is, isn’t it? There’s no good way to make it not.

“Oh!”

They jerk apart, wondering how they missed the bell chime above the door. There’s a stooped woman with long grey haired pulled into a bun staring at them in the entryway from over ugly reading glasses slipped low on her button nose.

Eve stuffs her hands in her apron pocket and stares straight up at the ceiling.

“Eve. You’re...who’s this?”

Villanelle gives Eve a curious look, because she’d like to hear Eve try to describe her. But Eve just keeps her eyes on the ceiling and presents Villanelle with an open palm. “Villanelle,” she explains.

The woman smiles secretively and winks at Villanelle. “Well. Don’t mind me, girls. I’ll just be in the back office. Very soundproof.”

And then she disappears and Villanelle stifles her laugh into her fingers. “Was that your boss?”

“She never comes in!”

“I thought you liked being watched,” Villanelle points out, just shy of smug.

“By you! Not by - jesus christ.”

  
  
  


____________________

  
  
  


It’s no third date, but they’re both naked so it might as well be. That’s what Eve says anyway - they didn’t really do dates in prison, and they  _ certainly _ didn’t do dates when she spent a year as the monster under her english teacher’s marital bed, all claws and wicked, wicked secrets in the dark. She doesn’t know much more than the desperate pleasure of digging your nails in when you manage to find something worth hurting for.

But this isn’t that, not at all. Eve doesn’t like to be put on her back, which doesn’t surprise Villanelle all that much. It feels like a thing she hasn’t earned or hasn’t aligned, not quite. Eve is testing her, she watches her carefully and Villanelle likes that too.

And she likes her, she really really likes her in a love kind of way, so she doesn’t mind when Eve puts her down instead, presses her spine into the wonky springs of her bed and holds her there. Villanelle’s led a slippery life, mercurial at the best of times, so she thinks maybe Eve’s tight grip is not a matter of possessiveness so much as practicality. If she’s not held down, who’s to say where she’ll end up?

Eve wants her there and that’s a powerful thing.

They don’t ask who was there last, track yellowing bruises shaped like the fingerprints of the last people they let hold them too tight, touch them that way, outlines like white chalk crime scenes - they don’t do that, the two of them. It’s not about rehashing the old, it’s about putting boots down in new snow. It’s about tracking trails for themselves.

Eve pushes her fingers deeper and Villanelle gasps ridiculously because what’s to be surprised about? Eve somehow fucks like she knows things too, clever lady.

Why would she ever think Eve would shy around from this? They’ve had all of the hesitation beat out of them, all the  _ almost _ and  _ maybe _ . You learn truth in a violent kind of way in prison, for whatever that’s worth, and the truth is that almost and maybe might as well be never. It often is.

Villanelle twists her fingers into Eve’s hair and lets out a little hiccup at the rhythm and the paces she’s putting her through. Regimented. If she’s to learn anything at all, she’s to learn how to be someone else’s and this is a good start.

“Hey,” Eve breathes. “You can come.”

She’s right, she can. But there’s a reason she shies away from things that feel like endings.

“It’s okay,” Eve murmurs. “You’re okay.”

It is. She is.

  
  


____________________

  
  
  


The rain doesn’t stop of course, the pathetic fallacy would have been just too stark to swallow. Instead they stand under the little lip of the roof that hangs over the fire escape and drink birthday champagne from stolen diner mugs while raindrops splash at their bare feet and the smell of rain suffocates the smell of their apartment, hanging open at their backs. Rats dash between dumpster covers, collecting drowning worms like dropped bills. Eve blinks sleepily, smiles at nothing.

“Thanks for the birthday sex.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I can’t believe I have to wait another year for it.”

Eve grins, tips her entire glass back and chases her back into the apartment laughing, “Shut up.”

  
  


____________________

  
  
  


Meredith is the owner’s name. She comes back the next day and spends a lot of time winking at them and isn’t that just the most invasive form of support either of them have ever received. Very charming. Very inappropriate.

  
  
  


____________________

  
  
  
  


Eve puts on music in the diner instead of AM cryptic murmuring and the way Villanelle knows she’s in a rare kind of good mood is that she actually cranks it up past dial six. She can hear it, real music from this decade and it’s happy too. She didn’t even know this town received FM waves, everything else seems to pass them by.

A man comes in and that’s a bad way to begin most sentences. Most tragedies start thusly.

Villanelle looks up from the newspaper she’s been reading upside down for the better part of twenty minutes at the lone table, waiting for Eve to notice. She’s gaining a new appreciation for the long game, even in this.

He doesn’t see her as he passes by toward the counter where Eve is standing with her back to him. His hands shake and each step jumps like shocked nerves, he  _ reeks _ of adrenaline. Eve’s hefting a bag of garbage over her shoulder and making her way through the rear service door that’s been propped open with an old cinder block. As she hustles outward into the rain, the man slips behind the counter and follows her out with lengthening, amped strides.

Villanelle’s expression darkens and she folds her newspaper in half over one finger, tosses it on the table, and stalks after him.

By the time she clears the counter and rounds the service door, she’s already in media res. They’re rolling on wet asphalt like they’re in the ring and despite being different weight classes, Eve isn’t doing terribly. He has her by the front of her apron and just manages to wrestle her down, a forearm across her throat as he pushes a handgun into her face.

  
“I just want the money!” He shouts, cries maybe. He’s waving a gun, but he’s more scared of her than she is of him.

“Join the club!” Eve roars, scrambling to bring her feet between them like she’s trying to scale a cliff. He blocks her by pressing his hips closer and she beats at his chest in blind rage.

“I’ll kill you!” He warns desperately and even in this, Eve isn’t impressed.

“Fucking try me,” she grunts and that’s enough of that. Nobody will be trying that today.

Villanelle wraps her arm around the man’s neck and rips him off of her, paying mind to snag his wrist and twist until the gun clatters away, he’s so weak with fear. She means to throw him far, dispatch and move on. But they keep  _ touching. _

She’s asked them not to  _ touch. _

Her arm tightens, pulls higher right against the line of his jaw and she feels her heart rate slow where it’s pressed against him. It feels good, it always does, to extract your price. If this is what it takes to keep something for herself, then it seems appropriately valued. His hammering pulse absorbs hers and she feels almost tender as she chokes him to death.

Eve staggers back to her feet from the ground and approaches. “Stop,” she commands.

Villanelle looks up sleepily, almost trance like. She’d like to kill him for this, she really would. But Eve is glaring at her, wiping away a spot of blood from her split lip and it’s not a request, not even close. She stares evenly into Villanelle’s eyes and shakes her head minimally.

_ Do not. _

“Why?” Villanelle wonders. “I told you. I don’t like it.”

The man lets out some desperate choking sound and claws weakly at her arm. They both ignore him.

“You think I don’t want to kill everyone who touches me? You think I haven’t given in? I’m telling you, you can’t live like this. I won’t let you.”

Villanelle considers her thoughtfully.

“I don’t care how they touch me. I care how they touch you. You’re mine.”

Eve narrows her eyes and Villanelle squeezes tighter, smiling slyly. What she can see of the side of his face is turning a dangerous shade of purple and Villanelle isn’t sure what game they’re playing, but she thinks she likes it. She’s going to kill him and Eve - well, she can’t stop her, can she? Does she know how? Even this?

“Let him go,” Eve says just as he begins to go slack, jerk with a final kind of sloppy desperation.

Villanelle keeps her gaze steady. “ _ Why _ .”

Eve looks her in the eye and it’s not pity there, god she couldn’t stomach if it was. She’d kill him if it was, he doesn’t deserve it, not after what he did. But it’s not. It’s  _ control. _

“Because I said so. And I never ask twice,” Eve promises.

The look she gets feels like the losing round of roulette,  _ bang _ , bad luck, no luck at all. A wide smile splits her face as she loosens her hold, opens his airway gently until he’s crying and choking through his nose,  _ relax _ ! He’s not even dead, the drama queen.

When she drops her arm, he drops too, rolling from his bruised knees to his heaving side as he coughs and coughs and coughs. Eve doesn’t look away from her, in fact he goes completely ignored, and Villanelle thinks,  _ good. _ Okay.  _ Because she said so _ , then, so be it. Losing has never felt so rewarding.

Villanelle offers a little, casual shrug and gestures at her feet like,  _ as you wish. _

Eve nods once and it sends a thrill through her. What other tricks might she find herself capable of? Stare long enough and you might see her roll over, speak. Play dead.

If that’s the way they’re to be, then that’s the way they’re to be. It’s a new fit for her.

They hardly notice when he crawls from his knees to his wobbly feet, then straightens and bolts around the side of the building out of sight.

Eve looks at her moments longer, unyielding and Villanelle feels it like a brand, feels it in every way she’s capable of feeling it. She takes a step forward and-

As she swipes the clotting blood one last time from her mouth, Eve turns on her heel and walks back in through the service door leaving her there alone.

Just like that.

Villanelle lets out a  _ hmph _ , flexes her sore forearm and frowns as she stares down at it. She’s traded something here, she knows it. Bartered on a whim and now she has to figure out what end of the deal she got. So what’s better than getting what you  _ want _ ? What trumps that?

Getting what you  _ need. _

Before the service door swings closed and leaves her out there in her coveralls and her pinched expression, Villanelle steels herself and wedges herself in the doorway, snagging the swing of the door at the last second before pushing inside. She catches sight of just the tail end of Eve’s apron as she disappears into the office and lengthens her strides to catch up. The radio’s playing something upbeat, swinging, gushing about love as Villanelle clatters past the grill on new, weak legs, knocking a cup of forks to the ground without pausing.

When she reaches the office, she hangs herself in the doorway off of spread hands dug into the frame. Eve’s back is to her, arms crossed. In the moment’s pause, she glances over her shoulder and raises an eyebrow and suddenly Villanelle thinks she might know some things too.

Pushing away from the door frame, Villanelle clears the distance, spins Eve by her hips and pushes into a kiss that has Eve falling backward onto her elbows on the desk. 

Eve allows it - that’s the right word. Always by her grace.

“The diner’s still open,” Eve reminds her when she has a moment - when she  _ takes _ it, puts one hand between them and keeps her at bay, like only she can.

Villanelle considers her. “Tell me to stop, then. Tell me anything. Tell me  _ everything _ .”

“Why?”

Villanelle presses her bare teeth to Eve’s jaw and breathes out. “You’re  _ so good _ at it.”

Eve groans and when she fists Villanelle’s hair too hard, Villanelle laughs breathlessly, squeezes her eyes and lets herself hurt. She’s never let herself hurt like that, because you can’t hurt if you’re in control. “You’re not good at being told.”

“I could be.  _ Tell me to be, _ ” Villanelle begs and instead, Eve shows her without hardly lifting a hand.

Eve’s not the one to clear the lamp, the growing pile of overdue bills, the desk bobbles and pens with a rough swipe of her arm that turns the floor into a disaster zone. Eve’s not the one standing over her, pushing her hips up onto the desk and battling past the inertia of clothes caught on hips, shoulders, arms, knees until it’s given up, abandoned, ragged in the right ways for hands to part and have her.

She’s not, Villanelle is.

“ _ Do this _ ,” Eve says without words and then Villanelle does it and it  _ fits _ like tailored clothes she’ll never have. Eve goes willingly this time, they’ve aligned and Villanelle  _ gets it. _ Eve goes even as she’s leading, knocking the notches of her spine into the desk when Villanelle lays her flat and begs words and instructions from on top of her that she sometimes gets, sometimes feels, sometimes learns.

So Eve’s not the one pushing her hips forward to aid in the rocking motion of the heel of her hand, fucking her too loudly while the restaurant doors lie vulnerable and unlocked at her back. Eve’s not the one who grows frustrated, rabid in the ways her hands feel too far, too clinical, no matter how hard she digs in until she has to rip her mouth away and stoop over to tasting the pattern of her fingers there until it’s enough. Eve’s not the one digging teeth into her shoulder afterward and scraping her raw while a peppy band on the FM wavelength sings about electricity and sweetness.

Eve’s not, Villanelle is.

But hey, she might as well be because Villanelle’s never had a person so thoroughly without having them at all. She’s never wanted and wanted not. She’s never forgiven and she’s never forgotten but if Eve wants that of her, she can have it. She can ask it.   
  


Hands draw her face back to task with the final critique spoken into her mouth. “Be good. I’ll keep you.”

It’s amazing they need to write music at all, doesn’t it write itself?

  
  


____________________

  
  
  


The City finally sent someone by sometime during the day to replace the bulb in the streetlight at the end of Eve’s alleyway, just like that. Eve remarked that it’d been dead for eight years and suddenly like  _ nothing _ , Eve’s evenings go from darkness to the orange slant of outdoor fluorescence as it cuts sideways from the southern window in a broad stripe running from her headboard down her neck, cutting off at the middle of her naked back.

In the city, it takes as long as it takes. It happens when it happens. And if you have any questions about it, any complaints, you’d be better off sending smoke signals.

Neither of them have questions. They know better.

“You can go again. They say women at your age are in their sexual prime.”

“If you ever start a thought with ‘ _ at your age’ _ again, you’re going to have to find a new place to live.”

What else is she supposed to make fun of her for? They don’t make it easy, perfect people. That’s an awful lot to ask of her, Villanelle thinks, but she doesn’t say it. She just lightly headbutts Eve’s spine and waits to be kicked out of her bed again. She likes to touch. Sue her.

“You really need to get a bed frame,” Eve grumbles. “We can push the beds together. You can be near me and be...less near me. Stop, you’re making me sweaty.”

Villanelle snakes her hands under Eve’s arms and folds her hands around Eve’s stomach just to prove some kind of point. “I just like you.”

“Is this what people feel like when they adopt a dog and say they aren’t going to let it sleep in the bed with them?”

“You never said you weren’t going to let me sleep in your bed with you.”

Eve rolls from her side onto her stomach, but Villanelle goes with her and folds herself on top of Eve’s back, chin on her interlocked fingers. Eve mutters something unintelligible into her pillow and Villanelle smiles. She’s very glad she is otherwise unencumbered by the societal expectation that she curtail the inconvenience of her company.

She’s never met a welcome she wasn’t prepared for and committed to overstaying.

“Well that was my mistake wasn’t it?”

“It was.”

  
  


____________________

  
  


“Wait, can we get a dog? No wait, I want a hedgehog. Or a lion. Eve. I want a  _ lion. _ ”   
  


“I already have to walk and feed you, don’t push it.”

  
  


____________________

  
  


The rain lifts sometime thereafter and it’s left everything overfull, overgreen for the end of the season, but smothered in the crush of shed and rot. Instead of crunching their way down sidewalks, they slosh their way through fjords in ugly rain boots. Villanelle’s have flowers on them. Eve’s have nothing because she’s an adult or whatever.

Villanelle stares in what must be a worrying manner at Eve’s hand swinging between them for the length of several blocks. Eventually Eve pulls her hand into her chest and gives Villanelle a suspicious look. “What? What’s that look? You’re weirding me out.”   
  


“Let me see it,” Villanelle demands, holding her hand out expectantly.

Eve squints at her for a moment, then slowly extends her hand out with a confused, cautious deliberateness. Villanelle takes it easily and swings it between them as they walk, smiling serenely.

“Oh gross,” Eve complains when she realizes.

There is no escape.

  
  


____________________

  
  


It sneaks into their lives like water through overworn rubber soles: barely noticeable until one day it’s flooded your socks and you have to wonder just when that happened. Good luck drying that out.

There’s a less gross way to describe it, probably. Eve likes that one best, though, and Villanelle likes her best. It is what it is.

  
  


____________________

end.

____________________

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the diner was wiDE OPEN, i've peaked
> 
> @coldmackerels on twitter if you want to argue about how eve totally tops from the bottom byyeeeee


End file.
